I've never, ever, understood these things. In what way am I helped as a developer by looking at a picture with some high-level namespaces?

I've always likened these posters to the legal books kept on law office bookshelves. It's 2010 and I'm not sure I want to set foot in the office of a lawyer billing $200+/hr if they're seriously still sifting through tomes.

I know what I'm talking about...you see all this wood pulp at my disposal?

It wouldn't help at all, but it might give the impression that you are a "profeshniol" to clueless IT manager types.

I'd like to be clever enough to emulate Cato the Elder, and come up with a short motto I could add to comments on all articles .NET related which encapsulates the following:

MicroSoft, good work with the .NET Framework, C#, F#, and LINQ, but if you want to keep Windows relevant, make all editions of Visual Studio free and open sourced. That includes the Professional, Tester, and Architect versions. It's not enough to offer "Express".

So maybe my motto should be "Open source Visual Studio!". (I sure hope I don't get down-voted or banned if I start doing this.)

Why does the editor have to be open source? I think you might have an argument if you wanted .NET and other proprietary software related to development open sourced and available on all platforms but an IDE is not something that needs to be open source (though extensibility is always good).

1) More important than open source, it needs to be free. It's danged expensive, and the version with the full compliment of testing tools is even more expensive. There are several very decent free IDE's not from MicroSoft, and they are primarily aimed at non-MS environments. It's in MS's interest to promote development in their OS talking to their family of software products.

2) Open source because MS still hasn't made it a good IDE for Javascript development. Yes it has Jscript Intellisense (nice), but you can't collapse Jscript by {} in the editor. This hampers it as a full-fledged web development IDE if you're going to do any more than trivial JS development. If it were OS, maybe someone would fix this.

I wish I had printed versions of those for my office. They might not be useful for day to day development, but it serves as a warning (of my nerdiness) to others when they visit.

I get tonnes done with my evil tools.

Jeez, Louise. Again: It was A JOKE. Why do you think I put it in inverted commas?

I wasn't freaking out on ya man! More a statement that I don't mind if people know I use (and love) .Net.

As a non-native speaker of English I thought "poster" could also be a persons who posts (for example links to a news site). Therefore, I misconceived the meaning of the headline as stated above since it appeared in the context of hacker news. Also: it was just a joke.