Love them or hate them, the ALT.NET mailing list is a source of interesting debate, commentary and insight. I can’t help myself but to participate. Debate is good. Stifling debate is bad. Period. End of debate. (see!? That was bad!)

The community itself is a young community, and as such, they are going through a period of identity forming. What are their shared values? What does it mean to be an ALT.NET-er? It’s not exactly clear yet, but it is starting to form.

One thing I would caution this community is to be careful in how they define their shared principles. For example, in one thread one individual mentioned debating me and then in the same message proposed the idea of Composition over Inheritance as a shared principle.

In response, someone posted this:

You can throw the book at those people–literally. Favoring composition over inheritance is straight out of the Gang of Four book. Don’t like design patterns? Fine. No problem. I have a couple of Don Box COM+ books that say the exact same thing.

Here was my response, which I also wanted to put in a blog post since it represents pretty well what I think.