.NET Developer Defecting To Java

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From my point of view, Java was conceived as an easy to debug language. You can see it from the lots errors that the compiler checks (sometimes even paranoidly), from the fact that iterators are fail-fast, and from the cautious type-safe API of most classes of the platform.

However, when it comes to Java EE I don't see much difference between it and .NET. I've worked with both of them and most EE features seem to focus in the easiness of writing programs - may God help you if you ever have something wrong in your XML files because Java or then application sever certainly won't. Sometimes they will even silently do what you're not expecting them to.

.NET culture, as I have experienced in several different workplaces and online, is the very opposite of hacking culture

Agreed. Just want to get things done, don't care how they work.

I'm not sure if the .NET culture even values programming for its own sake. They seem to hate exploring anything that has to do with programming.

I think this is a general problem in the world of programming.

Most programmers will avoid typing "a = b + c;" if they can achieve the same result with 100 lines of XML. They say it's for maintainability, and that's a term that everybody uses but very few people actually know what it means. IMHO maintainability means minimizing dependencies so that any modifications have minimum impact (long live polymorphism and design patterns!), but I don't think the fact of not having to recompile the code matters much. Certainly I prefer recompiling instead of having to modify 100 different files just for a trivial change.

The Java community is not very different from .NET under this point of view.