Simplicity

Aq. has more comments on my post about Bob’s hero post but I still don’t think he gets it¹.

It has nothing (directly) to with the tools. Large, complex applications can be written with other languages/frameworks, but inversely .NET can be used to write small, simple applications. The main thing is that .NET encourages you to write large, complex applications. All of the articles, help etc. are geared towards n-tier design and interoperability. Once you get into this frame of mind it can be difficult to see the wood for the trees – you’re so focused on implementing things properly that you forget to do it simply.

The reason that Bob thinks Frank is a hero is not because he does wonderful things with non .NET technologies, but because he does them any technologies at all. Frank focuses on what makes makes his applications good rather than what makes an good application.

Case(s) In Point

People in the .NET world rave about .Text because of it’s design. When I looked at it I found it overly complex. The same is true of FlexWiki – good, but too damn complex! They may be excellent pieces of application design, but I find them to be over-engineered.

At the other end of the scale… I wrote a wiki the other day in C# (running on Mono) in Vim, via a SSH connection to my Linode. It weighs in at 183 lines, of which about half are blank (I like clean code me).

Yes, yes I know it’s not going to win a prize for being the shortest wiki – it doesn’t even attempt (yet) to obey all of the “Wiki Principles”http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?WikiPrinciples but it works and that’s what’s important. I’ve written smaller apps, and I’ve written much bigger apps, but my point is that C#/.NET/Mono does not force me choose either.

Convergence

This is where the .NET and Mono communities can help each other. .NET has a doctrine of n-tier and enterprise level applications, whilst the Mono guys are coming from the UNIX background of lots of small, interconnected tools. The .NET guys can help Mono in the enterprise arena, and the Mono guys can help .NET developers think about simplicity.

¹ Except of course he does (see “here:http://www.kryogenix.org/days/2005/03/21/aspnet#au1111596084.32 as well), but I felt the rest of the post was too good to discard.