C++, D: Dinosaurs?

[Nick Sabalausky]

"Robert Fraser" <fraserofthenight at gmail.com> wrote in message 
news:geo6oh$14m3$1 at digitalmars.com...
> Nick Sabalausky wrote:
>> For example, have you ever tried doing web development? You can't 
>> realistically do anything nontrivial without tripping over at least 
>> handful of different, essentially domain-specific, languages: ECMAScript, 
>> (T)SQL, (X)HTML, XML, CSS, and either PHP, ASP/VBScript, ASP.NET/C#, 
>> Python or Ruby. And that's just the bare minimum for any non-trivial web 
>> site. For one thing, most of those are great examples of the fact that 
>> domain-specific languages do nothing to prevent piss-poor language 
>> design. But besides that: Conceptually, web development is one of the 
>> most trivial forms of programming out there. But the domain-specific 
>> language-soup realities of it have turned what should have been trivial 
>> into one of the programming world's biggest pains-in-the-ass. It's an 
>> absolute mess. I'm currently writing my first compiler, and I have in the 
>> past written homebrew for the Atari VCS, and an Asm sound driver for a 
>> multiprocessing microcontroller/embedded-device that has no sound 
>> hardware other than a generic DAC capability. All of those have proven to 
>> be far less pains-in-the-ass than any of my web development work. 
>> Considering the conceptual simplicity of the web, that's just absolutely 
>> pathetic.
>
> Microsoft agrees.
>
> http://www.informationweek.com/news/internet/webdev/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=204701262
>
> Write your web frontend & backend in .NET. Throw in a little LINQ-to-SQL 
> and you don't even need SQL. (The official website ihas been down since 
> September... I assume they're productizing it).

Microsoft comes up with a lot of great ideas like this, but then they hijack 
any potential for widespread usage by marrying it to other MS-only products 
and technologies. I'm not saying its good or bad business sense for them to 
do this, not saying it's ethical or unethical, but as an outside programmer 
it just doesn't help me much. Which gets frustrating, because I'll know I'm 
looking at a good thing, but just can't justify jumping on board until if 
and when the open-source community builds a compatibility-solution.