Much of it might be true from that developers point of view, but the fact is PHP, Java and Python have been the tools of choice for most of the big and innovative web successes. fx. MySpace, Facebook, everything Google, Wikipedia, etc.

But does that mean you have to code in PHP, Java or Python to write innovative web apps? At least i don’t think so, most of the common used dynamic languages are very similar in concept and ability and the same is true for the typed ones. So i would argue that most of these sites could have been written in pretty much any language and what makes the special was a good idea, timing and a good bit of luck.

So suggesting you can measure “cutting edge” by language choice seems a bit off to me, unless you suddenly start to code Perl 6, Google go, Scala or some of the newer languages that try to change the concepts or how we code I don’t think you can claim language as the reason for being “cutting edge”.

My point about web development as a “narrow window” is in relation to the front end focus most web developers have. For example looking at Rails sites like Github and Twitter; is it because of Rails both sites “innovated” in their field? For me in both cases what makes them special is the back end, Github would be quite useless without git and so would Twitter without a good message queue(written in Scala).

Front end web development is as mainstream as it gets, pretty much all languages have a frameworks with MVC, ORM, AJAX, etc. So ruby or C# does not really make that much of a difference in how things are built.

So for me at least back end, mobile platforms and development tools is where you can be cutting edge today.

For a project/library/framework to really become mainstream in .NET, it pretty much has to be released by Microsoft.

Like Casper said, .NET supports a huge number of languages, but the only ones that the mainstream developers use are the ones supported directly by Visual Studio. Anyone could have used a MVC framework for their web development projects, but it didn’t actually take off and become commonplace until Microsoft released ASP.NET MVC.

Individual .NET developers might be every bit as passionate and curious as Ruby developers, but they’re not the ones defining the .NET community as a whole.

@Hartvig: Thanks. I’m glad to hear so much good stuff is going on in the .NET community. I’ve heard many good things about Umbraco, and IronRuby support sounds awesome – I’ve also fixed the link, sorry about that ;) Umbraco CodeGarden sounds cool – I’ll mail you :)

@Troels: I agree with a lot of your points, and you are right that Ruby – as a slow, interpreted scripting langauge – are not being used much for non-web development. I don’t think web development is a “narrow window”, though – everything is flowing together these days; desktop, mobile, gaming and web are all intermingled. You are absolutely right that what you build matters much more than the tools you use, but try and say that to a .NET developer – I don’t think many of them will touch e.g. IronRuby before it’s supported in Visual Studio ;)

But today you will find pretty much the same Web 2.0 stack in any language you can think of, the syntax might be a little different but the philosophy and techniques are the same. eg. Symfony, Grails, Django, Catalyst, etc. And most of the projects are not that much younger than Ruby on Rails. So it might seem to suggest that what really differs is the loudness/hype rather than actual technical difference.

Moving away for web development Ruby also quickly seems to fade when it come to active development and cutting edge, here “old” languages like C, C++, Objective-C, Java and C# make up a large portion of the interesting stuff being developed, just look at some of the Open Source desktop projects, the mono project, android, object db’s like facebooks Cassandra or many of the other projects that litter source forge, github and google code.

Also as communities borrow the cool “cutting edge” stuff from each other, programming language matters less and less as the same frameworks appear in J-versions, N-versions and more fancy-named alternatives in each language.

So for me at least cutting edge has very little to do with language, OS, software stack or how many times you can sneak social, web 2.0 or restfull in to the description of your new web app. What does matter is how novel and different the thing you are trying to build is, not what tools you use.

Like you credit Rails for giving up on prototype, you could also easily give MS credit too in the way they’re pushing jQuery despite their big earlier investment in their own js framework (ASP.NET AJAX).

There’s also plenty of .NET OSS projects on GitHub – for instance the wonderful IoC framework Ninject.

And oh – Umbraco (which btw is located at umbraco.ORG not .COM ;-)) are adding full support for IronRuby in v4.1 coming within weeks – we’re crossing fingers that it’ll help adopt the wonderful language =)

As you say – much have changed over the last couple of years and it’s easy to enjoy working on the .NET platform and find passionate people. Come to my Umbraco CodeGarden conference in June (I’ll give you a free ticket) and you’ll at least find 250 of them ;-)

/n

As a .NET developer who has had some exposure to the Ruby and Rails it certainly is quite different. I suppose in some ways it is inevitable that .NET tends more to a follower based approach and being a little less innovative.

I thinking you summed it up will with “The ratio of highly passionate developers actively seeking the cutting edge of software development are higher in the Ruby community than in the .NET community”.

This post was mentioned on Twitter by fabricius: The culture of development communities: Ruby vs. .NET http://ff.im/-hLKVw...