... it still seems funny to me that the greatest (er, most overtly visible) example of a language's superiority is how well it works as... an angle-bracket generator.
Calling web development "angle-bracket generation" is like calling Shakespeare "a guy who drew letters on paper".
Walt Whitman and Tolkien and Neal Stephenson and Abe Lincoln and Plato didn't even have to generate angle brackets. They got away with plain text! And yet their job was no easier.
Of course, Hanselman was joking, and the joke was even funny. I think that ABG would be a nice name for a web framework.
Is it just me or did this article just kinda die midway? I was reading with the impression that the Arc Challenge reference was just some example he was going to use to talk about how we keep oscillating back and forth between thin and thick clients... but then it just ended. I guess showing a bunch of Arc Challenge solutions was the point?
Given typical Microsoft attitudes, Hanselman deserves credit for recognizing that languages other than C# and VB.NET exist, and that people actually use them. That's much more than you can ask for from typical Microsoft bloggers who act like the only database anyone uses is SQL Server and the only language people use for web apps is C#.
I agree. The Microsoft universe is incredibly insular. This is a strange intellectual reflection of the Microsoft-vs.-the-rest-of-the-universe commercial situation that has been the case for so long. If you live in the Microsoft universe, chances are high you identify "innovation in programming technologies" with "Microsoft's latest release". Hanselman stands out for being one of the few who care about (or are even aware of) anything else.
But I wish he wouldn't broadcast his ignorance by writing LISP.
Calling web development "angle-bracket generation" is like calling Shakespeare "a guy who drew letters on paper".
Walt Whitman and Tolkien and Neal Stephenson and Abe Lincoln and Plato didn't even have to generate angle brackets. They got away with plain text! And yet their job was no easier.
Of course, Hanselman was joking, and the joke was even funny. I think that ABG would be a nice name for a web framework.