J2EE, .NET in Slugfest?? What, as in lettuce leaves and garden mulch?

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Caught this on Franky’s blog:

About an article written in the Australian on J2EE and .NET…this makes me shake my head.

Firstly, J2EE and .NET in slugfest! What a title, jeez, if people thought my moustache was going to be soooo 1980’s, this takes the cake full stop.

I mean, who honestly out there believes that the old “My platform and language is better than yours” argument is still relevant? Except for justifying the writing of articles such as this.

Why do I feel so outraged by such articles? Because they add no value! I mean, Eric goes from coast to coast like a man possessed, just check out the rhythm:

  • Paragraphs 5 & 6 bring VB into the slugfest…hang on, I though this close out was for J2 and .NET?
  • Paragraph 7 draws Visual Studio into the mix…ahem, .NET isn’t an interchangeable term for Visual Studio!
  • Paragraph 8 casts the net out to IBM and the Rational gear…that’s a complete spin of the needle right there!
  • Paragraph 12 really rocks the boat with the road forking towards AJAX, Google and GMail…what have these got to do with J2 and/or .NET? AJAX!!!? Urghhh!
  • Paragraph 20, and now were getting into the gooey world of frameworks… I love the quote from a former J2EE developer, David Smart, that reads, “"On a Java project I might be using the Spring Framework, which won't be used on the next project" (David was using this to support his claim that “relying on open source frameworks makes J2EE programmers unproductive”)… ouchies, the same could be said for any framework, J2 or .NET… lets not forget some heavy hitters like NHibernate, NUnit, NAnt, Cruise Control…all of which are specific, non-trivial, and extremely powerful.

Anyway, Eric goes onto the rake up PHP, Perl, and Rainbow, all of which serve to cloud the already murky waters of his article.

I wish people wouldn’t write these kinds of sensational articles. In a time when as developers across the board, we should be focusing on higher level conversations around productivity and best practice, wasting cycles on which language/platform is the best is actually making us as a community go backwards. I’m a developer first and foremost, I care about SDLC, SCM, best practices, and I’ve chosen a set of tools and a platform that suites my needs and capabilities, as have many others. Do I care that another developer isn’t using my tools and platform? No! Do I want to talk to them about writing software quicker, smarter, better? Hell yeah! Do I want to read muck? Yes, but I’ll keep that to my gardening magazines ;)