From: Satya ilugbom@thesatya.com
Dude, you have some major misconception here. Let me clear it up.
It compares much better, as I can write useful production code without having to pay someone hundreds of dollars. I do this for a living, too. Oh, and the code is usually plain text so you can hack with a text editor and don't need an IDE-- though you can get those, too.
You don't need to pay microsoft a penny to write code, compile it on their .NET platform, sell it, distribute or any kind of commercial activity with *your* software. You also need not buy Visual Studio .NET from microsoft. You can download the .NET SDK from www.microsoft.com and use a freeware IDE to develop your applications. For example, WebMatrix (http://www.asp.net/webmatrix) or ICSharpCode has another powerful IDE, "SharpDevelop" - http://www.icsharpcode.net/OpenSource/SD/. So you really don't need to pay them hundreds of dollars ;)
Actually vim's syntax highlighting and other programmer-friendly features do it for me.
All IDEs have pretty syntax highlighting.
Regards, Dinesh
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