I am going to assume people are suggesting ASP.NET MVC and not ASP.NET WebForms when they say ASP.NET ;)

I am going to assume people are suggesting ASP.NET MVC and not ASP.NET WebForms when they say ASP.NET ;)

There is only one kind of ASP.NET development and that's MVC. Just like the Star Wars prequels, WebForms does not exist.

You're also wrong on the HTML5 front. Many modern website developers are using it quite successfully for enhancing website experiences for users on the latest browsers, while also providing a graceful failure for browsers that do not support it.

By redirecting them to the download page of the latest version of Firefox?

But seriously, I couldn't live without the new HTML5 tags. They're so useful with laying out websites, instead of just using div tags everywhere.

Well, I just got a 95 on my HTML online quiz (w3schools.cm) and a 90 in CSS. I'm reading about asp.net and JavaScript now, and I really like it. I recently used HTML5's new structure tags (Nav, article, section, aside) and div's combined with CSS to make a website with a "wooden" feel. It's pretty awesome.

"How about PHP?"

"It's awful. Community sucks. Toss it."

"Flash?"

"Crap. Bloated. Everybody hates it."

"Why?"

"Because it works."

"What about basic HTML?"

"HTML5 is better."

"So the right answer is to throw out 100,000 man-years worth of working technology in favor of this new thing? What happens when HTML5 is widely used?"

"We'll toss it and start over. Just like we've been doing since 1961. What, you think everything being broken all the time is by accident?"

If we built buildings the same way we build software the first woodpecker to come along would destroy civilization.
-- Gerald Weinberg

~crap~

You sound like someone who doesn't like or understand learning new things. There are objectively better ways of doing things now than there were 10 years ago, and to suggest that we should stick with something just because a lot of man hours have been put into it is idiotic. Just like why houses aren't built out of brick and mortar any more, there are cheaper, more efficient ways of doing things now.

There are also plenty of reasons to not want to run Flash...

Lack of Flash Gives MacBook Air Two Extra Hours of Battery Life
Flash Player : Security Vulnerabilities

If we built buildings the same way we build software the first woodpecker to come along would destroy civilization.
-- Gerald Weinberg

This is also ridiculous. We have woodpeckers and worse in the software world. We have people actively trying to compromise systems and while it causes problems for some, it's hardly catastrophic to the industry as a whole.

You sound like someone who doesn't like or understand learning new things. There are objectively better ways of doing things now than there were 10 years ago, and to suggest that we should stick with something just because a lot of man hours have been put into it is idiotic. Just like why houses aren't built out of brick and mortar any more, there are cheaper, more efficient ways of doing things now.

You know they still build a lot of houses out of brick and mortar...

I think through this thread you are jumping to some rather vast conclusions about what people are saying. There is a tremendous difference between adopting new technology when it is ready and mature and throwing away 100s of years of man hours at the slightest wind of change. The former is slow to adapt, but the latter will never see anything released because there is ALWAYS something new that changes the way you develop software.

You seem to be taking personal offense. I'm not a huge fan of that article either. It paints a gray issue as totally black and white. It also makes some rather bold assumptions that php's negatives, of which there are many, are not in any way balanced by it's positives, which are a very significant reason it's used so prevalently in the first place.

[quote name='tstrimple' timestamp='1355206274' post='5009348']
You sound like someone who doesn't like or understand learning new things. There are objectively better ways of doing things now than there were 10 years ago, and to suggest that we should stick with something just because a lot of man hours have been put into it is idiotic. Just like why houses aren't built out of brick and mortar any more, there are cheaper, more efficient ways of doing things now.

You know they still build a lot of houses out of brick and mortar...

I think through this thread you are jumping to some rather vast conclusions about what people are saying. There is a tremendous difference between adopting new technology when it is ready and mature and throwing away 100s of years of man hours at the slightest wind of change. The former is slow to adapt, but the latter will never see anything released because there is ALWAYS something new that changes the way you develop software.

You seem to be taking personal offense. I'm not a huge fan of that article either. It paints a gray issue as totally black and white. It also makes some rather bold assumptions that php's negatives, of which there are many, are not in any way balanced by it's positives, which are a very significant reason it's used so prevalently in the first place.
[/quote]

Indeed, there are still some very valid reasons to use PHP, third party code being the big one. (Extending Joomla or Wordpress using a language other than PHP is a rather painful exercise for example), There isn't much positive to say about the language itself though. That it somewhat resembles C (and thus looks familiar to most programmers) might possibly be its only advantage (And back when the alternative was to use classic ASP with VBScript it was a huge advantage). Things have improved slightly in later versions but once you compare it to the alternatives the language is just a disappointment.

My personal favourite by far is python+django, any webdeveloper who hasn't tried it yet should take it for a test drive, i can almost guarantee that they'll fall in love with it.

You know they still build a lot of houses out of brick and mortar...

And they are more expensive, slower to build and far less energy efficient. What's your point?

You seem to be taking personal offense. I'm not a huge fan of that article either. It paints a gray issue as totally black and white. It also makes some rather bold assumptions that php's negatives, of which there are many, are not in any way balanced by it's positives, which are a very significant reason it's used so prevalently in the first place.
[/quote]

PHP's positives are also negative as well. It has a very active community. The majority of it's community however are amateurs. It's very much a case of the blind leading the blind and occasionally someone sees the light and realize how bad PHP is as a language and moves on to something else.

I used PHP for years. It was my first back end web development language and like most other PHP developers, I wrote some terribly designed websites. When I realized there was something wrong with having my SQL inline next to my HTML, I started looking for better ways of writing applications in PHP so I turned to frameworks like Cake and Symphony. They managed to make things better for a while, but it was certainly refreshing to be able to jump ship and work on an intelligently designed language like C#.

I won't say don't use PHP. There are sometimes instances where that is the best business choice to make, such as if you have a team of experienced PHP developers with no experience outside of PHP. Use what they know! Don't waste cycles trying to learn on top of building a new product. Anything you can do with one backend technology, you can do with another. It's just a matter of how much you have to fight the language you're working on to get things accomplished.

What I'm saying is, if you're new to web development and looking to learn, stay away from PHP. It's a black hole of poor language design, lousy management and amateur users.

Indeed, there are still some very valid reasons to use PHP, third party code being the big one. (Extending Joomla or Wordpress using a language other than PHP is a rather painful exercise for example),

It's pretty painful with PHP as well ;)

I agree with this for prototyping or standing up a simple content website which requires minimal coding changes.