I've re-read those posts like 5 times, and, I can't tell if he's trolling.

If yes, bravo. Masterful work. I'm being totally serious. The quality of trolling on the internet has reached an all time low. When you have people who honestly cannot tell if their chain is being yanked or they're seriously engaging in debate, you've reached the apex of trolling.

If not, don't take offense candybar. This is a friendly place, and differing, reasoned viewpoints are welcomed.

/kind of hoping troll

Thanks for backing me up, gaming_mouse - I can assure everyone here that I'm 100% sincere here.

The original context here was criticism of PHP, in essence, that it sucks. It's full of inconsistencies, not orthogonal, attracts bad programmers, teaches bad habits, etc. There's some truth and some language snobbery there.

Then clowntable came here to compare PHP to Windows. In short, bad programmers use bad languages the same way that bad programmers use Windows.

At that point, given the context, it bears pointing out that the only platform vendor made it a priority to make it easy for developers to use good languages and good language features (see F#, LINQ and computation expression, which brought monads into the mainstream) to develop for its platform is Microsoft. Microsof takes programming languages more seriously than any other platform vendor and employs some of the best minds in programming language research (Erik Meijer, Simon Peyton-Jones, Don Syme, etc) and gives them important work. Contrast this with Google, where accomplished engineers without a strong background in programming language research seem to come up with new languages to solve their own engineering problems, which is how PHP came about. Or Apple, who have no interest in designing good programming languages any more and are completely content to push Objective-C, which isn't even the most interesting language associated with Apple (Dylan is) and is seriously dated, as the face of their development platform.

You can criticize Microsoft's approach or work, but the point is that the comparison is highly awkward. Microsoft is fully on-board with the language snobs and their development tools reflect that. Other companies support PHP-esque solutions. It's strange to say that good programmers will gravitate towards PHP, but away from Microsoft's development environment that natively supports languages like F#.

Hi sdturner02,

As I already mentioned, I'm not trolling. I'm curious as to whether those of you that doubt my sincerity have experience, insight or information that contradict or at least cast doubt on what I wrote. If so, why are you guys not sharing them? If not, that's perfectly reasonable, why should everyone know about programming language research or F# or LINQ or whatever else Microsoft is up to? But if you're dismissing as trollish what I'm saying without having much applicable knowledge on the topic, that's simply prejudice at work.

Microsoft's .NET/Visual-Studio/Language-Design team, which has some of the programming language researchers I mentioned, along with Anders Hejlsberg, who created Turbo Pascal and Delphi, is probably the best such team in the industry. The Light Table guy (http://www.chris-granger.com/2012/04...w-ide-concept/) used to work on that team as well. You can even see that it's inspired by Microsoft's design language.

I certainly don't.

But if you seriously cannot understand why arguing that Microsoft is superior to Linux in a programming thread tends to create a suspicion of trolling, you must be new to the internet.

I'm not sure why you think this is an important point. The vast majority of my programming work is supported by non-"platform vendors" (however you define this). So even if your whole diatribe on why Microsoft is better than Apple or Linux was factually accurate and well thought out it still wouldn't actually prove the point you're trying to make.

For example, take a look at: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_server#Market_share. There's lots of reasons why non-Microsoft platforms do as well as they do.

Aww, you bit, Joey.

What is the point I'm trying to make? What great tools from those non-platform vendors you are using are not available for Windows?

You lost me there. This started as refutation of the following comparison: PHP is an inferior language for development and people who use it tend to be worse developers. Just like Windows is an inferior tool for development and people who use it tend to be worse developers. And now you're citing Apache's high market share as a reason why the above reasoning is valid? Not only is PHP also popular, it also drives Apache's popularity.

http://w3techs.com/technologies/hist...mming_language

By popularity, PHP and Windows-only (for the most part, though it can theoretically run on Mono) ASP.NET are by far the best tools for server-side development. The post I responded to was arguing the exact opposite.

obviously you've never seen the works of some of the classic slashdot trolls. this guy is a master of his craft.

the salutations give it away

i don't get it. a polite, respectful troll seems like an oxymoron. doing a huge level is different from trolling.

****.

Is it too late to claim I was doing research for my troll bot?

Meh, I think your definition of trolling is wrong. As far as I'm concerned the best trolls come across as polite and well intentioned.

From the first line of the wikipedia article:

boom mother****er!
suck it!
your mom's so fat, when she jogs in a red sweatsuit all the kids say, "hey, koolaid!!!"

Honestly, the only thing I really miss when developing on windows is a proper shell. It is hilarious that in 2012 that the default command line in Windows is so so terrible. Total joke.

edit:

gm, your definition of a troll is narrower than the rest of the internets.

gaming_mouse, obviously a troll edited that Wikipedia entry in an attempt to protect their craft haha.

Trolling and flaming are two very different things. Trolls try to illicit emotional responses from people. Flamers just insult people. No one actually gets insulted by being called names on the internet, so there's no fun it unless you're a 13yo kid. But watching someone get upset about something and clearly demonstrating that, well, that's a different story.

guys,

quit trolling me. thanks.

Um... This isn't trolling it's just not understanding English. Someone can be inflammatory without being offensive. Notice the parts about provoking emotional responses and dragging people off topic.

he made a post about his opinion of windows developer tools in a programming forum. it's not off topic. is it inflammatory? i understand you guys are making an "expected response" argument. but what that amounts to is that anyone who disagrees with the prevailing forum wisdom is a troll. i don't think that's cool. and i don't give a **** if i'm being leveled. it's still not cool.

fwiw i do not think candybar counts as a troll or is trolling. i do think s/he has some radically different beliefs from most of the community.

i'm also just gonna leave this here, because i have a feeling someone's gonna need it:
http://www.catb.org/esr/writings/hom...hedral-bazaar/

I guess i should have made a bigger disclaimer than gaming. For example...for web development lol Windows.
Powershell is still fairly crappy.

The entire Unixoid userland is way more developer friendly. Package management and automatically setting up a synced up developer environment for N developers is much better on Unixoid systems. Everything's just way more scriptable.
Stuff like ssh, svn/git etc. that I concider essential have always felt natural on Unixoid systems and kind of "second class" on Windows.

TextMate lookes pretty good on OSX and if you want some sort of IDE Eclipse, RubyMine and so forth are all available on Unixoid system (as are screen+vim and other goodies)

I dunno much about JVM vs VS details mostly because last time I used C#/.NET was during university.
I'll doubt your claim that the JVM is inferior to .NET though (and even if it is I'd guess it is miniscule). The JVM is pretty damn awesome. I'm not a fan of JAVA the language but the JVM is excellent. Depolying stuff works so great that people actually use JRuby for the depployment benefits.

You say this like it's a bad thing. Contrast this to most of what you'd use in your environement comes from...Microsoft :O

I'll make a highly controversial statement and say that Linux machines manned by programmers tend to be more secure, too.



I don't doubt that some smart people work there. But for many developing tasks the Windows environment sucks.

Also since I'm a Linux person I tend to belive the Open Source toolkit chain is best for developers (for starters they can read the source code). It's somewhat silly to compare a company with that.

VS makes eclipse look like absolute trash.

But VS only runs on a crappy platform :P
A good lean editor makes VS look like trash imo

I don't even want to think about the stuff some people can do with emacs lol

VS is probably the best piece of software I've ever used

From your article:

The "primary intent" part is there in clear english. That's what separates a troll (who is posting just for the kicks of riling people up) from someone with a non-mainstream opinion (who is posting because they believe in what they are saying).

Obviously, we can't always know if someone is trolling or not. And its why I haven't actually claimed that candybar is a troll. I was just making a joke that his one post would be a perfect starting troll post.