Dan Miser - Pragmatic.NET

Thursday, November 08, 2007

I've had some conversations with people about the label of ALT.NET. They are of the opinion that it causes controversy by setting up the "elitist" vs. "everyone else" mentality. This is not a new observations (see here and here, e.g.).

I'd like to propose that the divisiveness of the ALT.NET moniker be abolished as quickly as possible. To that end, my proposal for the name is Pragmatic.NET. It's both a state of mind and an homage to the Pragmatic Programmer series that touches on several of the topics important to this group.

Discuss...

Thursday, November 08, 2007 11:54:09 AM (Central Standard Time, UTC-06:00)

Comments [2] -
.NET

Thursday, November 08, 2007 2:32:46 PM (Central Standard Time, UTC-06:00)

That name or "Pragma.Net" or "Prag.Net" was floated in Austin as a possible replacement. It doesn't really help either. Just imagine this response: "what, you're saying that you're 'pragmatic' and anyone who disagrees with you isn't? who do you think you are?"

ALT.NET is divisive, but everything else I've heard is pretentious.

Jeremy D. Miller

Thursday, November 08, 2007 4:07:17 PM (Central Standard Time, UTC-06:00)

Jeremy,
If "ALT.NET is divisive" then, IMO, it's clearly the wrong name. Brian Donahue claims that ALT.NET is "about choice" but it seems unclear who is going around and restricting choice? Is ALT.NET targeting the Dilbertesque manager?

If you read the developer meme these days TDD, Agile and automation are just a few of the things at the forefront and while not everyone is "drinking the koolaid" the proliferation of tooling in support of these objectives is making it more difficult to avoid taking a sip.

For me, ALT.NET is currently the Seinfeld of movements. It's really about nothing new or different echoing your comments from "ALT.NET isn't completely baked and there's nothing new here...".

If it's about getting together to discuss the current meme's then that's great and I'm all for that but I think that's hardly alternative nor reason to be divisive.

Steve Trefethen

Comments are closed.