No stranger to the moleskin trouser

It just doesn't...

"There's one reason," said Phil, reinforcing his words with a pointing finger, "I would never, ever use .NET for a real website, not even if Steve Ballmer himself rang me personally and begged me to. And that one reason is" – he paused for dramatic effect and a mouthful of Sam Servlet's Magnetic Media Peculiar – "is this: it just doesn't scale."

"What, the 'it doesn't scale' claim already, Phil?" said  Dennis warmly. "I expected better from you. I didn't think you'd fall back so swiftly to that hackneyed grenade of bogusness. The ignorant can fling that at any technology, and reckon to flee the crime scene under cover of the ineffectual splutterings of the victim. It cuts no ice with me. I've seen the [OTT-and-NSFW-but-still-funny] MongoDB is web scale animation. I am unmoved."

"And as for you, Mister Native Code," Dennis added, rounding on Jake, who was laughing, "I suppose you are now going to lecture us on the importance of generating machine-specific object code?"

He tried to underline his challenge by popping a crisp into his mouth and crunching firmly, but the effect was significantly weakened by an errant crumb adhering to his chin.

"Well, I do think we all need to bear in mind the Evernote experience. And of course, as my reference points out, remember that MS itself abandoned an attempt to write great chunks of Windows Vista in .NET," smugged Jake.

"Instead of which they wrote it natively, with such brilliant results," muttered Dennis indistinctly through a mouthful of Stephen Fry.

"But actually, I don't think that the flabby, slow code for which .NET is rightly notorious was necessarily the primary cause of trouble," continued Jake complacently. "It's the actual developers themselves who were the problem."

"Yes, let's face it, .NET people are... well... 'thick' isn't the right word at all," said Phil.

"Oh, go on then. I can see you boys have got your toys on a roll. What is the right word?" growled Dennis.

"Your .NET programmer is very... enterprise," said Jake.

"The sort of people who buy guarantee extensions for their toasters," expanded Phil.

"The sort of people who always chortle at the Quote of the Day," explained Jake.

"They set aside time to read government leaflets on Alternative Voting."

"They can use the word 'stakeholder' without blushing."

"They have contemplated re-artexing the ceiling of the spare bedroom. Know what I mean?"

"They are no strangers to the moleskin trouser. Present company excepted, of course. Oh..."

Borne away by his part in the duet of rhetoric, Jake had forgotten until too late to check the vestments of his companions. He attempted to peer under the table while pretending not to, and quickly discovered that this is impossible.

Nobody seemed to have moved, but Phil had somehow contrived to position himself with the lower half his torso concealed by furniture.

Dennis sat up and ostentatiously brushed salty fragments of witty crisp from a corduroyed leg. "Well, fellow stakeholders, I may not scale, I may be slow, and I may be enterprise, but I do know one thing."

"What's that?" asked Jake.

Dennis smiled him a beatific smile. "It's your round," he said. ®