Item — HN Reader

Ruby pulled me out of C# hell and allowed me to see other open source stacks and for that I love it. I'm so happy now that I can work with a clean language with a small difficulty curve.

I look like a wizard to management!

I'm not working on projects with millions of daily users, just simple CRUD enterprisey apps, and Ruby and Rails are my Virgil, guiding me through programming hell. :P

1 comments

Curious what were the worst pain points of C# for you?

I have to be careful about tendonitis flare ups in my wrist from my musician days. That makes languages like Java and C# literally more painful than languages like ruby that require less typing.

Why is control-space so difficult? Christ, Eclipse auto completes so much you can just bounce on control-space all day. "m" ctrl-space "sysout" ctrl-space... It's so easy.

I'll volunteer a few more:

Amazing ecosystem + package manager.

The problems you get to work on tend to be less soul-crushing.

I do lots of typing, day and night, and have had near-crippling pain. I did two things that seriously helped.

First, I mapped keys at the OS level that reduced awkward movements, the most obvious of which is changing the caps lock to control.

The other major thing is acquiring a kinesis keyboard. After several weeks of using it, the pain gradually subsided, and now I have none.

The other thing i did in conjunction with this keyboard was to remap some of the keys unusually, like putting the escape key close to where my thumb could hit it.

There should be enough keyboard choices and key control to make the choice of language on criteria other than wrist or finger pain.

One of the worst pain points of C# for me was that the open source community is practically non-existant. So many wheels end up being reinvented because nobody has bothered to share their wheel, and Microsoft hasn't released their wheel yet.