Should every .NET developer understand the CLR? Here's my opinion:
I've been a Visual C++/MFC/ATL/Win32 developer for a long time now. When I added VB to my toolbox I was struck by two things: first, how much more effective a developer I became (see Joel's article for an excellent explanation of this phenomenon). This was expected, of course. It's what VB is for. The other thing was a surprise - the dumbing-down that went with the VB lifestyle. Books, conferences, magazines, newsgroups. Tons and tons of patronizing, simple stuff intended for people who were using VB because they couldn't handle C++. The Windows development world was split into two camps, serious C++ and simple VB. It sucked.
Note that I'm not saying that VB developers were dumb. I'm saying VB developers were treated as though they were dumb. Keep it simple, stupid. (Things did get better, of course. Eventually there were a few speakers and authors who were clearly heavyweight developers and they spoke highly of VB and encouraged its use for serious work and didn't patronize us. Ted Pattison, Matt Curland, Don Box, Francesco Balena, for example. But these were the rare exceptions.)
So now to the present. One of the major changes that .NET brings is that we now have one development environment that we all share. The differences in the languages are not enough to warrant two such diverse cultures. So what will happen? Will the "serious" culture get dumbed down or will the "simple" culture smarten up?
The article above is a call for all .NET developers to have a general understanding of what's going on, and I'm all for it. It's not enough for even an introductory class or book to just teach the syntax of one of the languages. The .NET culture must span a huge spectrum of developer abilities but there is a base level that it should not be allowed to go below. Instead of "Keep it simple, stupid", prefer Einstein's "Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler".
9:17:32 PM 
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