Jeremy Miller just posted about the ALT.NET Conference and touched on the whole elitism/Mort-bashing conflagration that is drawing the ire of many bloggers lately.  I'm convinced that most of the people expressing dissatisfaction with ALT.NET (Sam Gentile comes to mind) are probably saying something of the same thing, but are thinking of different things in their mind.

I know that wasn't clear, let me try to give a specific example: The term 'Mort'.

The problem is, the archetype term 'Mort' covers a lot of different types of people. There are, at least, three sub-types of Mort:

1.) The Factory Stamper (a.k.a. a 501 developer) - who programs as his job and just wants to get things done because finishing a project is his first concern. Things like maintainability, etc are not primary and he deals with those problems as they arise. He comes in at 7:30 and leaves a 5:00 and doesn't think any more about coding once he's gone.

2.) The Isolated Elvis - the one who has maybe heard of things like NHibernate, but is isolated and cornered in his job and doesn't have the permission to experiment with things like this. He is straddled by his bosses, or a closed-minded architect hoisting house-built frameworks on him.  This person longs to try new things and branch out, but doesn't have time during the working day to do this and maybe isn't aware of the community goings-on or doesn't have time to go to after-work activities

3.) Mort Interrupted - A Mort who is up-to-speed with the community and desperately wants to do things like TDD, BDD, DDD, etc but either doesn't know how, knows how but it never seems to work correctly, or gets interrupted by his boss/manager.  He's struggling to both be a technologist *AND* and evangelist. He's trying to solve problems the best way he knows how, but he doesn't have the salesmanship to convince his superiors that these are worthwhile endeavors and will bring Real Business Value(TM) to his company.

Mort(2) and Mort(3) are honorable in that they have a deep-down desire to develop better software and to advance the art of programming.

I would say that everyone engaged in the ALT.NET discussions is a Mort(2), Mort(3), Elvis, or Einstein.  By the very fact that you read blogs and even comment occasionally shows that you are not a Mort(1).

I think that when people make fun of Mort, they're usually making fun of Mort(1).  We all sympathize and I think many of us probably ARE a Mort(2) or Mort(3). I would consider myself, at this point, a Mort(3) by virtue of where I work and my lack of success in proselytizing within that organization.

The unfortunate part is that we usually end up getting stuck maintaining a Mort's code at one point or another.  At least with a Mort(2) or Mort(3), you can sympathize and it doesn't suck nearly as much to know that the guy was at least trying to make an honest effort and just didn't know better.  With a Mort(1), it's very frustrating know that this guy has no interest in improving the overall state of the art.

Edit: Typos (how come typos are 100% more apparent *AFTER* you post?)

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