I've been a Microsoft developer for decades now. I weaned myself on various flavors of home computer Microsoft Basic, and I got my first paid programming gigs in Microsoft FoxPro, Microsoft Access, and Microsoft Visual Basic. I have seen the future of programming, my friends, and it is terrible CRUD apps running on Wintel boxes!
What I’m looking forward to/hoping for, is the open source community to reimplement Discourse’s backend in other languages. Why? Well I do a shedload of PHP work, on PHP sites, where a modern forum (especially a moder AND secure forum) would be greatly welcomed. But being customers with PHP sites, on PHP infrastructure, they’re not going to have a Ruby forum.
Or on a subdomain, not until the SEO benefits are the same as a subfolder…
Here’s looking forward to a language-agnostic world, one thing .NET did get right!
Still, we obtained the absolute fastest CPUs you could buy for the Discourse servers, 4.0 Ghz Ivy Bridge Xeons, and performance is just … good on today’s fastest hardware. Not great. Good.
Thank you for making me feel good for staying with Python.
Jokes aside, good luck with your project, it looks really interesting! (And at least it’s not on .NET)
I am genuinely curious how you have felt about and handled the recent spate of vulnerabilities?
I think there’s a deeper Ruby pysche thing at play here: http://williamedwardscoder.tumblr.com/post/43394068341/ (my blog post about the vulnerabilities)
You say “I think you can see a future not too far in the distance where .NET is a specialized niche outside the mainstream”
Why is that?
Nice to see how you completely avoided to mention PHP. 
Hey, a FoxPro hacker! I still do some Visual FoxPro. The red-headed stepchild of the Microsoft stable, much maligned by people who know nothing about it, still supported, refuses to die despite Microsoft’s best efforts.
what did you replace sql server with?
Why not to use Mono (opensource re-implementation of .NET)? You could keep C# and everything would be open.
LXj42: I did a little performance testing recently and was actually shocked to see Ruby perform better than Python. This was using a trivial program, so the performance might be different at another scale, but still: Ruby is pretty fast, after all. (JRuby is crazy fast, too. During testing I also tried JavaScript, and, well… V8 blows everyone out of the water. Totes expected
Sorry to hear you missed everything that Mono has to offer. Besides, I don’t think your licensing issues with SQL Server relate to .NET at all.
However, It’s also worth mentioning that Discourse is, if anything, even more of a JavaScript project than a Ruby on Rails project.
Have you considered using a language that compiles into JavaScript (CoffeeScript for example) instead?
@Ibrahim see: http://meta.discourse.org/t/is-it-better-for-discourse-to-use-javascript-or-coffeescript/3153
“Getting up and running with a Microsoft stack is just plain too hard for a developer in, say, Argentina, or Nepal, or Bulgaria”
I live and work in Bulgaria, and you are wrong. My impression is that most Bulgarian programmers use .NET. I am not sure if you imply people are poor and don’t have the money to buy the tooling, but this is not the case. Most programmers start out working for a company and most companies in Bulgaria pay for Microsoft tools. Once you have the skill, even after you move on and start contributing to open source projects, you don’t give up on .NET. I think that Bulgaria is no different that the US in how developers decide what tools to use.
I’m a little bit confused by this whole “Getting up and running with a Microsoft stack is just plain too hard for Johnny Foreigner” business.
Why? Why do you think programmers from Argentina, or Nepal, or Bulgaria are incapable of using free-as-in-beer Microsoft tools, but instead require open source tools?
A couple of things I’d like to comment on
As much as I like Discourse, man do I wish you had chosen Python.
Jeff,
Which your development environment for Ruby?
I am a .NET/Ruby developer and I have a MacBook for Ruby development, running Windows on Parallels to develop in .NET.
I worked only with .NET for 6 years and then I started developing in Ruby too. Nowadays, I can apply a lot of “Ruby ways” when I write .NET applications. To code in Ruby makes me a better .NET programmer.