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Gotta give it the vote, even if just for the headline. Graham sparked it all off with his article - this is the result. That's the web!

Got to give it the *down* vote, just for the headline.

It seems to be mostly .NET developers who are arguing against Graham's article. You know, the kind that don't mind that they're helping Microsoft use their platform to oppress the rest of the computer industry.

Haha, I got some news for you benatkin. Paul Graham thinks Java is just as dead as .NET. But continue to drink the kool-aid about "Microsoft oppressing the computer industry". You gotta love the fantasy worlds that people concoct.

Here's the thing...there are plenty of things that are pronounced brain dead, yet keep on living...long past their logical existence.

Reality doesn't always cotton to logic, sad to say.

Yeah, I agree! Anyone that uses a proprietary toolkit is a shill! We should all go back to programming in ANSI C. *cough*

Even if you think that Microsoft is oppressive and that .NET developers are adding fuel to the fire, that doesn't mean that Graham is even remotely correct in his statements. I'm no Microsoft fanboy, and I know a line of BS when I see one.

(But yeah, maybe I was a little harsh with the title. :)

It's been written on the wall for some time now that operating systems are being increasingly comoditiezed, and that the ability to use an application will depend less and less on the operating system. Webapps is only half of it; portable applications is the other. This is not news; just like TCP/IP wasn't new when the web was born. And the shift won't happen tomorrow either; the mainframe point is valid, only this time it'll be platform specific libraries (like .NET, Mono notwithstanding. I have yet to find the app that runs on both .NET/Windows and Mono/Linux) - they will be around for a long time and slow the transition down.