thatfloatingguy

I think the whole evergreening and "patent a trivial change to our drug because the previous patent expiring" thing is wrong, but a company should profit after inventing a life-saving drug.

Look at it this way, if tomorrow a company came out with a complete cure for cancer, and we took away their right to profit from it, yes it'd put cancer victims in a good spot. But it'd screw everyone with a not-yet-cured disease over, when the company can't afford to pay employees, and the medical research industry goes down the drain.

People work for a profit, and that includes medical researches, who go through years of school. You take away that profit motive, they'll have to go do something else to put a roof over their head, and you'll save more lives in the short-term at a very high very long-term expense.

Maybe I'm misunderstanding, but $650k seems like a huge return on 3 months of one person's work, which they can then pour back into the product, hopefully improving it far more than they could've in 3 months without $650k.

I keep hearing that there are better options... but I haven't found one which is personally better for me. I'd love to hear suggestions if you have the time.

I think the biggest problem for me isn't some attachment to Windows Server (I much prefer working on a Linux server), or some misplaced love for WebForms (ick!), but the C# language in general.

There are a lot of great dynamic language setups on Linux (Rails, various Python stacks, etc) which aren't bad or anything... but I always find working in a dynamic language to be a bit of a hindrance. I've been writing a multiplayer game server in Go, and I can't even begin to list the hours of work compile-time type tests have saved me during early development as I constantly refactor. But on the other hand, I wouldn't want to write a large "business" style web-app in Go (my day job), which really doesn't have a standards library tailored for it.

I also get the feeling that the dynamic language web-stacks suffer from relatively poor performance compared to the CLR, and for some of the clients I work with who need to do some fairly complex non-database processing, this wouldn't be a great thing. Maybe this concern is unfounded though.

Perhaps Java is the closest match to .NET, both in style and in spirit. But having done a fair amount of Java development for Android, Java just feels so clumsy and clunky... The language isn't as nice, the tools aren't as nice, and the standard library just doesn't compare in terms of letting my express myself quickly and easily.

When one of my clients needs a web-app, I always go .NET. These projects won't ever be scaling to millions of users, so server licensing really isn't an issue. On the other hand, there will be lots of direction changes no matter the amount of planning, so static typing can be a God-send with the safety blanket it provides. And C# really lets me write clean code more quickly than in anything else I've worked with.

If I we're creating a product for a start-up, I probably wouldn't go with it... licensing costs would be an issue. But then again, if I was running a start-up, hopefully it wouldn't be a relatively boring business-app that was best suited to something like .NET. And if I were creating a product for a huge number of users, it'd be worth pouring in the development time to have a super high performance back-end in a language separate from the quick-to-add-features-to Ruby front-end.

But for my use case, I just haven't found a better option yet. I'd love some suggestions though, because I'm not a big fan of Microsoft these days and wouldn't mind being less at-mercy of their platform. Maybe my concerns are unfounded though, and I'm just stuck in what I know, but I do branch out a lot for personal projects.