My opinion about the ALT.NET probably has been misunderstood by a few bloggers that only focused on the first part of the post.
Both Ayende and Jay Flowers disagree with my opinion that 80% of the developers can't get the concepts behind ALT.NET.
Actually I didn't say that they can't get it, I only said that they don't want to stay up to date, which is a lot different.
Even if there are a lot of talks going on, a lot of blog around (as Jay says in his post) most of the developers are not interested in "being on the edge", so they will never go to talks, and read blogs: just as example, in the Java space, how many Java developers exist in the Milan area? 1.000? 5.000? Why does the meetings of the Jug Milano only have 30 listeners?
And I'm not saying that Windsor, MonoRail or NHibernate won't succeed. Maybe the tools themselves won't live more than a few years, but the concept will, as they will probably be "assimilated" into something Microsoft will package and ship in a way that the masses can grasp.
I'm not debating whether this is good or bad, as also Steven Harman says:
I realize that much of the world only eats what it’s fed from Microsoft
I’d rather not debate why or why not developers are constricted to only using Microsoft technologies as opposed to some excellent alternatives ... but would rather we all agree that this is a reality in the world in which we live, OK?
And, one last clarification: my opinion is based on my experience working 10 years in Italy and 8 month for a small, marketing-lead company in Wellington, NZ: maybe the situation is different in the rest of the world.
Just to make you all feel a bit more what is like working in the IT field in Italy, I'd like to point you to a post, unfortunately in Italian:
Alessandro Sorcinelli, an Italian blogger, says:
"the problem is that the companies don't allocate working time for the developers to study and learn new technologies or approaches".
"time is money and developers study if they can do it during the working hours and most of them, once they find the long searched permanent job, are satisfied and don't go on studying and learning".
Mauro Bennici, always commenting to the first post says:
"In Italy, the training during the working hours is perceived by the companies as a unnecessary expense".
I know that the best way to evangelize the 90% non alpha geeks is to teach them what the good practices are, but, as result of social, cultural and political issues, in Italy this is not possible.
And if you really interested in understanding more read the following 2 posts, especially the comments (sorry for the ugly automated translation)
- Italy is only 23rd in the IT Competitiveness (one of the last in Europe, just before Spain, Portugal and Greece)
- Yet another big mistake on the website of ATM-MI (here the post is not relevant, but the comments do are)
Now you might understand why a lot of Italian developers are moving abroad to find a better job.