Raymond Lewallen

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It's pretty simple really.

Many of the crowds that are the loudest supporters for Agile, TDD, etc are arrogant, rude, insulting people.  They do a poor job of explaining their principles and justifying the ROI behind them.  If you question them you are a Mort or just don't get it.

Now, I'm well aware that many people out there are great human beings, the problem is the above people are louder, and more public because of the controversy they stir up.

When people who are highly visible in that community spend a good majority of their time slamming others, one tends to see a blog post pop up from them and thing "dear god, what are they going to attack now?".

That's my take, it's an image problem with the that segment of the communiy.  Sahil Malik's fragilist post didn't come from nowhere.

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Eric,

A lot of that comes from the fact that many of the ALT.NET crowd have made a living over the years cleaning up the aftermath of a Mort attack. I know I have. I know firsthand that Jeremy, Jeffrey, Scott, and several others have also.

I think the reason they're so arrogant might not be so much arrogance as 100% confidence that the Visual Studio Designer-driven development almost always produces shoddy, unmaintainable code that we end up having to maintain.

And the Morts come in and look all great and wonderful because they can crank out an 'enterprise' system in a few weeks using RAD designers and such, but after 2 months when the system is grinding to a halt or falling over and the 2nd wave maintenance developers explain that Mort's big ball of designer-generated code mud is unmaintainable or that it's prohibitively costly to maintain, the execs get rather angry and we usually bear the brunt of angry managers with unrealistic expectations and ridiculous fantasy deadlines.

It seems that for every 2 or 3 Morts, there's an ALT.NET following behind him with a broom and an angry manager on his back screaming into his ear.

> Alt.Net and Microsoft should go walking down the aisle together, get married, and produce offspring that carry the dominant genes of both pools.

Ding!

While no company can solve all our problems - nor should we expect them to - the problems they can solve they should solve well. Part of the responsibility is on us to be heard clearly.

@Eric - Arrogant? How so?

I think it stems from the culture of Microsoft and the Microsoft development community "Softies".

In contrast Java and Ruby for that matter are a community owned, there isn't one company that sets the pace and vision were the languages or practices can go.  The community evolves the languages and they determine the best practices that meet the business domains goals.

Conversely the Microsoft community has always been lead by  MS and not the developer community.  Microsoft sets direction on how to use their products and provides tons of documentation for their (coughing) best practice approaches.  Softies immediately follow suit as gospel.  Anything in different from gospel is perceived Anti MS.  Hence the comments that many of us receive.  I have heard several times from various people, "Where does MS see TDD"  Who the hell cares!  But because MS doesn't endorse it, Softies will not accept it.

Take for instance monoRail.  Hands down the best MVC framework for developing .Net web applications.  Do softies care, no.  Why because MS didn't create it.  Trust me once Scott Guthrie completes his MVC framework, the Softies world will marvel at such a creation and call it innovative and leading edge.  Forget that there has been an alternative for 2 years.  

Cmyers,

Your response did nothing but to prove Erics point further. I'm not insinuating arrogance (I don't think you can make such judgements from non-face-to-face assumptions) but rather his comment about explaining the principles and ROI behind the preached practices and approaches.

I'm all for agile development processes and best practice development, however these are not easy concepts and should be approached with a "This is how and why it's done and please lets address any queries/concerns and see if we can improve on the explanations or processes themselves" rather than "This is the RIGHT way and anyone that queries it can feel the wrath of the "Anti-Mort anihilation team".

Dan

I guess it's still fashionable to bash Microsoft.  Me, I complain from time to time, but I try not to bite the hand that feeds.

The comments are interesting because I've had pretty much the exact opposite experience with the agile/tdd crowd. So far, I've seen nothing but absolute unrestrained helpfulness and delight that someone else is attempting to go down the agile/tdd path. I think the difference may have been in my approach. I did not go in thinking that my way is the best and I don't need to do things differently. I came from the exact opposite stance--I'm not sure how I've made it this far doing it the way I do and if I'm going to keep doing it I've got to make some huge changes.

Raymond, I found out about the code-camp the day before and didn't go. Primarly, because I had a client engagement that day and secondarily because of the mentality that's I've experienced going to MS sponsored events here in OKC before. While it's a huge over-generalization, the OKC dev crowd tends to be very pro-MS and if it's not distributed on the msdn dvd's then it doesn't exist. I've intentionally gone to MS events in other cities to see if the crowd is different, some are, some are worse.

Alt.NET Conference

Eric:

In my experience, many of the .NET Agile proponents that I read are not rude and condescending. I'd throw out Jeremy Miller, Sam Gentile, Brad Wilson as some examples.

The main problem is that a few rotten apples, one of whom posts at Codebetter, spoil the barrel., Making it seem like the vocal jerk minority is the Agile majority.

Raymond: The big problem, as has been noted before, is with the name. How can something called "ALT.NET" not be seen as anti-Microsoft? Alternative to what? Bad coding practices. Where are the bad coding practices located? In .NET. ALT.NET. If it had been named "Super.NET" or ".NET++" or even just "Agile.NET", you'd be in a much better position to make your argument. People have complained about the name before, but it's stuck. And you're stuck with the negative connotations associated with the name.

A lot of .NET developers get most of their information about Agile from Codebetter.com. Heck, even the name of the blog site implies learning. I'm not sure all of the posters at Codebetter.com are embracing the idea of teaching rather than preaching. I know you can't control what others say, but it paints ALT.NET in a bad light.

Embracing Agile techniques does not have to be a boot camp. Developers don't need to have their spirit broken down and then built back up. From what I've seen, Agile is best learned by example.

cmeyers:

"A lot of that comes from the fact that many of the ALT.NET crowd have made a living over the years cleaning up the aftermath of a Mort attack. I know I have. I know firsthand that Jeremy, Jeffrey, Scott, and several others have also."

My entire 11 year career thus far has been nothing but legacy code, with a few exceptions. "Cleaning up after Mort" so to speak. And for 99% of my career, I've never used Agile techniques. I think the Agile community does themselves a disservice by pointing at their techniques as the main reason for their success.

www.lazycoder.com/.../the-number-one-trait-a-successful-developer-needs

www.codinghorror.com/.../000931.html

But I am right there with you wrt the bad code that "wizards" output and that you shouldn't lean on your ide and tools too much.

You've been kicked (a good thing) - Trackback from DotNetKicks.com

Why is alternative bad?

Why is it not a good thing to experiment? Is it bad to want thought leadership to surface w/in the .NET community?

TryItYouMightLikeIt.NET

I don't get it. I also really don't see where Bellware is all that arrogant. Opinionated, sure. Isn't that what blogs are for? If you don't like it just ignore it. Or comment. Or start a blog that argues back. Sheesh.

@Tim B: I find you comment interesting.

> I guess it's still fashionable to bash Microsoft.  Me, I complain from time to time, but I try not to bite the hand that feeds.

I was under the impression that my hand fed my family, not Microsoft's.  They may enable the tools that I use to do so (at varying degrees of success), but they in no way pay my bills; I do.

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Dave-

For the record I never mentioned anyone by name.  I do find it interesting though that several posters jumped onto Bellware, maybe that natural inclination of perception is something he should be concerned about.

My response to this blog post was just to point out that the perception is there in the community, you see it all the time.  Is it justified?  No comment.  All I can point to is that it exists, and most perceptions/biases/etc exist for a reason.  It's not like a chunk of the community woke up one morning and collectively said "I think today I'll accuse agilists of having an arrogance problem."

Instead of posters here trying to pull names out of a hat, a more constructive exercise would be to examine why the perception exists and what to do about it.

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