ALT.NET - Some Great Ideas Guys, But Get Over It

I have to agree with Jason on this one. A lot of the ALT.NET stuff I am seeing in the blogs and whatnot just seems foolish to me. There are a number of great tools or ideas in the list, but the approach is just silly. Roy gives a disclaimer of "I don't necessarily agree with the list here" and says he will post his thoughts later, but either way he is fanning the flames of thinking in trends and not thinking of what is actually best. I get this same feeling all the time when I listen to agile people. I usually end up agreeing with most of what they say, but they are so often too filled with zealousy that they have forgotten that you can still complete projects just fine without agile. Though I do think a more agile approach would often work great in development work, it is the attitude that is annoying.

Problem two with this list: who considers all this "hot". The bloggers? They make up a very small percentage of the programmers out there. Most of the programmers I run into are completely oblivious to what is happening in the .NET blogosphere. Even if that list is representative of the .NET blogging community (and I think only partially so), we are still dealing with a small minority of the population.

We are supposedly an industry of intelligent people. We have to be smart to deal with all this programming stuff, right? At least semi-smart? If so, let us pick technologies and practices with our head. Let us be able to look through the popular, the trendy, and whatnot, and apply all this in a much more sane manner. That's what they pay us the big bucks to do.