On languages and platforms
time to read 2 min | 316 words

I got the following question in email:

Can you blog about why you chose c# and .net over other languages for all your projects. What was it that made you stick around the windows platform? Was it coincidence or a firm decision based on something? Was it because c# was the first language that you learned in your profession and then decided to become a pro in that?

I would expect to see you working on OSS in the lamp stack. You could have displayed your capabilities very well in Java. Just a bit curious…

It started as a coincidence, truth to be told. I was working on what I had available at the time, and that was Windows. I actually made the jump from hobbyist to professional in a C++ course. I wanted to learn C++ because that was where most of the action was at the time. It was a Visual C++ 6.0 course, not something that I was aware of at the time. If it was a GNU/C++ course, I would probably be in a very different position today.

That said, it stopped being a coincidence several years ago, when I made a conscious decision to stick to the .NET platform. That decision was based on several factors. Size of the market, acceptance for deployment, familiarity, future prospects, etc.

In essence, it boiled down to the fact that I really didn’t have any burning issues with the .Net platform, I am familiar with it, what you can do with it and what you can’t. Moving to another platform would introduce a very high cost during the switch, but so far there hadn’t been anything that was enough of a killer feature to convince me to move there.

Note, this post was written while taking an Erlang course.

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