Re: What is the benefit to me of .NET as an end-user?

"Bob Dawson" <bdawson@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
news:4403336d@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
You seriously need to find better places to work. :-)

It is futile to look for the perfect employer when it comes to software
development. Some are definitely better than others, but the good ones are
so rare that I can safely ignore them when generalizing about the industry
as a whole. In essence, it appears to me that the way most businesses are
run precludes good software development, so much so that actual coding is
probably less than 5% of the total effort it takes to produce software.
Thus, even if moving to a new tool or framework were to double programmer
productivity (which .NET certainly does NOT do), it would result in only a
5% improvement in the productivity of the process. Since the cost of moving
to a new framework/tool is almost always greater than a mere 5% of the total
productivity of the entire process, it is rarely worth it.

A new framework or tool would have to have an effect of at least an order of
maginitude to possibly have any beneficial effect on users in the short run.

I'm not saying that .NET is a worse development environment/framework than
Win32, by the way. I'm saying it is not so much better in the hands of most
programmers using it that it is worth the cost, in the short run, when
evaluated in terms of end-user satisfaction. As there are untold hundreds of
millions of lines of code being translated or replaced all because of .NET
very quickly, it is very likely that this massive cost is not being properly
spread out, and end users are the ones that are paying the price.

The net effect of .NET is nothing more than an inefficient redistribution of
income to a profession that is still not very good at what it does:
programmers.


.

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