Originally posted by goldbug
It gives the developers the advantage to use the language most comfortable to them or best suited to the task, albeit without platform neutrality.
Best suited for the task? God help.
Who are we writing the applications for? The end users who generally are lame (not a bad assumption if they use only Windows ). They want applications that work fast and don't require them to upgrade their PCs every 3-6 months.
The requirements of the .NET and applications that have been made using it are pretty high, and yet still they run pretty slow specially during the loading time.
Its not quite fair but if I were to compare Artifact Desktop (artifact.com, uses .NET) and Adobe PhotoShop, I find that Artifact takes just a little more time to load than Adobe PhotoShop (with has Kai's Power Tools, 127 other plugins and 500 fonts to load).
I will call Artifact just a browser than fetches content in XML and shows it to you.
Also if you access the URL accessed(or to be accessed) by Artifact in Internet Explorer, it loads pretty quickly.
The advantage of .NET comes like when I am writing a program for desktop, I can use the same on the web like a script, but obviously something thats slower.
If I were to give my user, good XP (eXPerience) I will make two seperate applications, one for desktop (in C++/VC++) and other for web (in PHP/Perl/ASP)