.NET Productivity Sucks

I am being deliberately provocative in my headline, but a co-worker and I were commenting to each other that we felt that we were becoming less productive in .NET. On the whole, we do not think it is our fault.

Our current project uses the Prism framework. Only one member of our team can claim to be extremely versatile using this framework – the promise is that it allows developers to build applications that are easier to maintain.

Some members of the team are on a learning curve, but it seems to be a challenge for them. I experience the same thing a year ago on another project that was using Model-View-Presenter. In theory, the benefits are clear. In practice, not so clear yet. I find that I spend a lot of time learning and/or teaching, and I wonder what it will be like when we add new or different developers to the team.

I get tired of type errors in .NET – I have felt for a long time that the compiler is trying to protect me from making errors I would never make. But, I do not have have anything coherent to say about that right now. I just want to cite an interesting article that states that developers are more productive using Django than they are using .NET.

I have nothing to add – just want to say: I am feeling less productive in .NET than I used to. I like Python – I used it on a project over the summer. It felt great to deliver working code every day. Is it just me?

If You Don’t Get It Yet . . .

For twenty years, the skill that I have depended on the most is my ability to navigate change. Change is an event. Change is something that happens to you – you either cope, or you get left behind.

I have met people who, at a young age, felt that they could learn everything they needed to know, and achieve some sort of enduring technical competence. They quickly learned that the cycle of learning and changing never ends.

This video makes a few things clear: change is massive, change is unrelenting, change is occurring on a fundamental level. Assumptions are changing. Keeping up with the technical aspects of change is hard enough, but understanding the effect and significance of it is mind bending. Let’s face it, the impact of the change is enough to knock some of us out of our orbits. I will let the video speak for itself: