I'd say not elitist
... seems more like irrational prejudice.
but heh, thats just my opinion.
I tend to agree, although there's actually a real thought hidden in there, though muddied...
A big sign is when he calls .NET a "language". That shows he doesn't fully understand it, because otherwise, it would be virtually impossible to refer to .NET as a "language", even accidentally.
That misunderstanding gets him going in the wrong direction, when he intimates that there are few valid reasons for .NET to be on anyone's resumes. .NET is a rather large collection of frameworks, and much of them are devoted to encapsulating access to Windows. Microsoft has been working for years now toward making .NET the one-and-only way to interact with Windows. So it would actually be rather odd, and possibly worrisome, to encounter any experienced Windows software engineer who had NOT used .NET for anything. Especially since the author puts so much value in finding those people who "can't be stopped from coding" and who "write everything"...
As for using and reusing Frameworks... That's kind of the whole point, to avoid wasting time by rewriting (and retesting) code that's been written before. He's got the wrong analogy going, when he says .NET is great at "turning out 1.6 oz burgers, but when it comes to 1.7 oz burgers, you simply can't". A well-defined framework would properly abstract out the process of making burgers, making it equally good at putting out ANY size burger. And if it can't, it's easy enough to create an extension that can. That's the whole rational behind the design of a framework, with provisions for things like events and delegates, etc. Even if you come up with a really radical burger, stuffed with chopped vegetables and double-coated with secret spices and whatever, it's still basically a burger. The bulk of the effort still involves cooking a burger.
This touches on one of the biggest failings in software design: the idea that "We're doing something completely new, that's never been done before, so therefore we must do it all from scratch..." That idea has killed more software projects than probably any other.
But in the midst of all that, he's touching on a valid point. If programmers ONLY learn how to use the .NET framework, it can become a crutch that prevents them from becoming truly proficient programmers. It kind of reminds me of a similar argument involving guitars, where people who first learn to play guitar using an electric guitar can develop really sloppy techniques, which can then take massive effort years later to unlearn (if it ever gets unlearned). I remember having a similar discussion with my uncle (head of the CS department at a large university) when his department wanted to start teaching their basic data structures class in Java instead of in C. The natural worry is that, if students learn basic data structures in Java instead of in C, will they ever really grok the concept of things like pointers? And if they don't understand basic concepts like that, what trouble will they get into in the future?
Then there's also the fact that .NET isn't a particularly good framework. Anyone who's done much programming in the Mac world, with things like Interface Builder, the Enterprise Objects Framework, and WebObjects, will tell you that. A good part of this is because the .NET framework is in some cases a pretty thinly-veiled interface to the old MFC stuff. There's even some holdovers in there dating way back to the 16-bit to 32-bit migration that happened some, what, 20+ years ago? It's very bizarre that the brand-new .NET framework contains echoes of the long-dead 16-bit Windows. The main issue is that, even though we ostensibly have a modern framework, there are many aspects that are very clunky, which becomes very obvious when compared to similar functionality in the Mac world. I can actually understand why some people would be concerned about programmers whose only experience with OOD is Microsoft's twisted version of a framework. But something similar could be said of C++, which is quite messy for an OO language, and gives developers lots of rope with which to hang themselves. Yet, there are many fine programmers who learned primarily using C++. It would be irrational to avoid programmers who have C++ experience, and it's similarly irrational to avoid programmers who have .NET experience.
