While I agree that actual and direct comparisons would be very nice and useful, I feel the need to provide some constructive criticism of your post.
Windows -- Yuck
Some people like Windows. They develop on Windows. When they want things deployed, they might prefer a server-architecture which they already have intimate knowledge of, rather than some Linuxy thing which does have its different set of rough edges.
IIS -- Seriously? ... IIS maintenance across servers, but do they beat good ol' text config files?
IIS has since IIS7 had all its configuration in text/XML-files. While .NET on IIS5-6 only allowed you to move some settings from IIS metabase to an actual config-file in the site-root, IIS7 and newer allow pretty much complete configuration of any relevant setting, either trough this file or trough applicationHost.config.
Both are text-files. I'm forced to question how long it has been since you messed around with IIS.
C# -- Mixed feelings
C# as a language, while (IMO) not complete is still a very powerful, rich and expressive language. It does have its lackings, but you are writing your Windows/IIS hosted websites in .NET code and may as you please use any other .NET language.
Personally I'm getting more and more fond of F#, although I admit I haven't used it for web-development yet.
While your criticism about lack of direct comparisons is valid, the rest of your post reeks of a anti-Windows sentiment which has little basis in merit and entirely in preference. I'm surprised your comment is so highly upvoted.
I appreciate the constructive criticism, and I was expecting it. That portion of my post was just a rant, as I was going to take each point seriously but felt that would take too long. This does deter the quality of conversation on HN, so I should have refrained from posting that portion here and left it on Tumblr/Posterous. The upvotes may be due to the serious part of my post, or the the somewhat humorous tone of the rest which is sometimes the case on HN (eg: witty one-liners get easily upvoted all the time).
Regarding IIS, though, maybe it was just bad experience with a poor IT department. They would go into each server and manually reboot IIS, instead of writing a batch file or something to iisreset xx.xx.xx.xx for every server. Not to mention the fact SourceSafe was used for deployment. (And yes, my experience was before IIS7 which I only used briefly.)
I give C# credit and don't hate it entirely---it's probably more the paradigm (statically typed, class-driven OOP) which I have an issue with.
Windows -- Yuck
Some people like Windows. They develop on Windows. When they want things deployed, they might prefer a server-architecture which they already have intimate knowledge of, rather than some Linuxy thing which does have its different set of rough edges.
IIS -- Seriously? ... IIS maintenance across servers, but do they beat good ol' text config files?
IIS has since IIS7 had all its configuration in text/XML-files. While .NET on IIS5-6 only allowed you to move some settings from IIS metabase to an actual config-file in the site-root, IIS7 and newer allow pretty much complete configuration of any relevant setting, either trough this file or trough applicationHost.config.
Both are text-files. I'm forced to question how long it has been since you messed around with IIS.
C# -- Mixed feelings
C# as a language, while (IMO) not complete is still a very powerful, rich and expressive language. It does have its lackings, but you are writing your Windows/IIS hosted websites in .NET code and may as you please use any other .NET language.
Personally I'm getting more and more fond of F#, although I admit I haven't used it for web-development yet.
While your criticism about lack of direct comparisons is valid, the rest of your post reeks of a anti-Windows sentiment which has little basis in merit and entirely in preference. I'm surprised your comment is so highly upvoted.