I’m on record as dissenting from some of the planks of the Alt.Net bandwagon. I question design for testability and have extended that to questioning what I consider to be the over-use of Dependency Injection (though I’ve also talked about using it successfully in a project that I believe warranted its use). Further, in my last post, I asked if the Alt.Net folks couldn’t expand their treatments of design principles to include contra-indications or fault points. I also decried those who actively stifle alternative viewpoints, though I left it vague about who I think might do so.

Given all of that, it’s easy to see how some Alt.Net folks might see me as an antagonist and read my posts from an adversarial perspective.

For the Record

Realizing this, I thought I’d take a post to set the record straight. I’m glad that the Alt.Net movement exists and that there are so many quality .Net developers putting so much effort into that community. Software development is a non-trivial task with a huge range of concerns and diversity of environments. Having a group of people with an eye on broader software developments who then take the time to translate advances in other spheres into .Net is an invaluable service. Many folks in the Alt.Net crowd not only teach and explain software development advances, they work with awesome intensity to bring tools to the .Net environment that enable and promote these methods and practices.

Their passion and energy have advanced .Net development immensely and I would do nothing to take away from or diminish their achievements. We (as a .Net community) benefit from their work even if we don’t implement the practices, tools or patterns they espouse. Not only do we gain from the visibility they give our platform, but we enjoy improvements that make it back into our development environment (whether through Microsoft or through tools vendors who incorporate and enable better designs).

Elitist?

So is the Alt.Net community elitist as they have been accused by some? I’d be careful about making such an accusation. Any group is going to be “elitist” if only from the simple fact that for a group designation to be useful you have to have people both inside and outside that group. Attributing a personality to Alt.Net is complicated, though, by it’s amorphous definition. There’s no official designation, no tribunal, no excommunication procedure—there’s not even an official, endorsed doctrine. Alt.Net is a convenient designation to describe a general group of practices (and/or developers who favor or promote those practices) the details of which are in a more or less constant state of flux.

Generally speaking, those who identify themselves as a part of Alt.Net are some of the best and brightest in the .Net development community. They’re smart and they have strong opinions (however loosely held) and they are willing, even eager, to express those opinions when given half a chance. Smart people expressing strong opinion can come across to others as elitist but I don’t think that is an accurate description of Alt.Net as a rule. At worst, you can describe them as having high standards and the guts to promote the advantages of adhering to those high standards.

That’s not to say that there aren’t those in their ranks who sometimes behave arrogantly. As I described in my last post, I was stung by the public remarks of one prominent Alt.Netter and his casual disregard for my post and for me personally. I wouldn’t, however, paint that incident as either representative of Alt.Net as a group, or even as representative of that specific person.

Painting the Alt.Net community as “elitist” can be simply an excuse to disregard them and their practices and I think doing so is a mistake. Even if they were a bunch of elitist jerkwads (which, again, I do not consider them to be), the fact remains that their ideas and principles are valuable and ignoring them will only hurt you. I may disagree with the broad applicability of Dependency Injection, for example, but I’m glad I learned the concept from them so that I was able to use it when I ran into a situation that was pretty much tailor-made for that pattern.

Transparency

One of the reasons Alt.Net suffers the slings and arrows of their detractors is that they take pains to be transparent. Their email list is open (and public), many of them are prolific bloggers, and they aren’t afraid to speak up when they disagree with each other. This transparency can lead to unfavorable comparisons to organizations that are less open (like, say, the Patterns and Practices group at Microsoft). Such comparisons are misleading at best.

Laying your disputes out for public observation can make you look weaker than you really are because people will use those disputes as an excuse to ignore your strengths.  It’s easy to miss the reverse side of that coin—being open allows your ideas to be broadly tested and honed. It takes a certain degree if intellectual fortitude to operate transparently, but being able to do so leads inevitably to stronger solutions, principles, and practices.

Those who are willing to put their ideas out there with warts and all deserve respect. I, for one, am happy to give them the respect they’ve earned (even as I remain willing to question individual applicability in my own development).