The problem I have with GoogleUpdate.exe is that even though one uninstalls all Google software and all software using Gears, GoogleUpdate.exe still remains, still runs as a service, reinstalls itself, and provides no uninstall facility. Sort of like Sony’s root kit.

Not the thing I expect from the “do no evil” company.

With PHP it’s PEAR, I hate coming across code samples that just assume you have PEAR installed or, oh, sorry, this only works in PHP 5.0 or, oh, you *did* compile PHP with such-and-such switch right?

Rails has so many wonderful “helper” methods that you often can’t find where anything is coming from, don’t know if the snippet you’ve just grabbed is using someone’s home-grown helper extension or is one of the unofficial extensions that everyone seems to install but no one talks about.

ASP.NET has the issues you mentioned, plus the whole infrastructure of webforms which destroy the ability to use server controls with any client-side library that uses ids like jQuery.

Basically each platform has it’s pros and cons and a lot of how much you enjoy working in any of them is how well you know the entire ecosystem. When I first did PHP programming I thought it was the biggest mess of poo out there, with so many conflicting ways it could be configured, so many random folders it’s config could be pulled from, the huge number of sites with horrible samples that lacked any type of proper url encoding or sql-inject prevention. Now I think it’s great for small sites, though I still prefer ASP.NET for larger sites because of the easy bolt-ons like logins/roles, theming and internationalization support. With the new MVC bits they just dropped it’s actually a lot of fun again.