11 ms·

Where did the Microsoft tech stack disappear?

84 points by eadmund 8y ago

h4b4n3r0 8y ago
C++ is alive and well at all those companies, yet the bar chart shows zero. This immediately makes the rest of this “data” suspect.
- saagarjha 8y ago
  You were downvoted pretty quickly, but I agree with what you're saying: I don't trust this data. Out of curiousity, I searched up Apple. Of course I got Xcode, Swift, and Cocoa…but not much else. No mention of the hundreds of technologies Apple uses to keep its services (Maps, Siri, iCloud) running, no mention of even Objective-C, which probably outnumbers lines of Swift code ten to one. It seems like this website is just a collection of public perception about companies' tech stacks rather than being an accurate source.
  - rovr138 8y ago
    Not sure if you need to work at a company before you can submit the data, but it also seems like this scans the website and GitHub repos you give it to identify the stacks. This seems like a bad source. Specially if anyone can submit a company they don’t work for and only use the url scan feature.
mikekij 8y ago
My company sells dev tools to software companies. Whenever I have talked to a startup about their tech stack and they reveal they’re on .NET, I later find out that none of the founders are technical, and they’ve outsourced development to Eastern Europe or India. This is not to say that a startup founded by technical people couldn’t be successful using .NET; I just haven’t seen it.
- pnloyd 8y ago
  Maybe not startups per say but. - jet.com uses F# - stackoverflow is C# I don't get why a startup couldn't just use .net for the application layer hooked up to a MySQL or Postgress backend. The drivers for both Db exist so someone must be doing it.
  - maxxxxx 8y ago
    I work with C#/.NET but if I had to start from scratch I wouldn't use it. With a lot of platforms you are a second class citizen with .NET because most APIs get released as Java, Javascript or Python. The .NET version often comes much later. After working with MS for 20 years I am also not convinced they will sustain long term what they started with .NET Core. With a startup I would stick to open source. It's the more vibrant and reliable option.
    - CyanLite2 8y ago
      Lotsa FUD here.
      - maxxxxx 8y ago
        I think it help if you added some substance to your comment.
        CyanLite2 8y ago
        .NET Core is open source and is the flagship development environment for Microsoft. They have no other alternative and have publicly announced multi-year roadmaps and support agreements spanning nearly the next decade.
        maxxxxx 8y ago
        I hope they will stick to it but after seeing what they did with Winforms, WPF, WinRT and Silverlight I have my doubts. We'll have to see.
a2tech 8y ago
It’s the licensing. It’s always been the licensing. The cost is untenable for startups (and yes I’m aware of the various bizspark and developer offerings). Those special deals are awesome in the beginning but they have nasty teeth when you’re two years in and you’ve just started to get traction and out of the blue you need to pony up for sql server or windows licenses.
- hackits 8y ago
  SQL Server/Windows Licenses costs shouldn't really be a problem if you've factor them into your business plan and expenses. The businesses that get into trouble are the ones that naively assume software is free.
  - a2tech 8y ago
    They can be problematic if your growth doesn’t exactly match what your licensing growth plan is.
    - hackits 8y ago
      You shouldn't be in business if you don't know what your growth will be. That is all part of your business operation's and deployment strategy.
      - saagarjha 8y ago
        You might know exactly what your growth will be and realize that you cannot afford to license certain software after a certain point.
  - ebikelaw 8y ago
    How do you figure in the chance that some birdbrain from Microsoft is going to call you up and demand that you participate in a "voluntary" audit of your license compliance, which you agreed to as a term of your Windows license agreement? I know many of you don't really remember the 90s, but Microsoft was and is evil. I wouldn't touch anything from them, or Oracle, with a ten-foot pole.
scarface74 8y ago
In 2008, I looked at where the market was going and decided to tie my horse to Microsoft, .Net and enterprise development. It’s been a good ride, but it’s clear that JS is eating the world. I’m slowly moving over more toward JS and Linux. I am taking a brief detour to Python and AWS though. I’m not touching Ruby. There are jobs for it but they don’t pay well.
- finaliteration 8y ago
  > I’m not touching Ruby though. There are jobs for it but they don’t pay well. Source? I know I’m an N of 1, but I just got hired to work on a Rails app and the pay and other benefits are pretty competitive...
  - CyanLite2 8y ago
    Probably not in the same salary ballpark as that of a C# developer working on a line of business app for an enterprise shop.
    - finaliteration 8y ago
      According to the Stack Overflow survey results[0] Ruby actually comes out ahead of C# in terms of average salary. It’s also ahead of JavaScript. [0]https://insights.stackoverflow.com/survey/2017#top-paying-technologies https://insights.stackoverflow.com/survey/2017#top-paying-te...
      - scarface74 8y ago
        There is a balance between number of available jobs and the pay. Go is the top paying job but you may find yourself being unemployed for awhile or stuck at a job you don't want looking for Go jobs. Ruby may pay more but once you get to the higher end of the scale, you'll find many fewer jobs paying the amount you want. EDIT: In 2008, after being at one company way too long, I was what would be considered a top C developer and there was a company offering me $20K more than I was a making. But I saw the pickings were slim. There were more jobs paying the same amount for “Enterprise C# developers”. But I wasn’t qualified for them. I took a job paying only $7K more than I was making as a high entry level C# developer. 10 years later, there are no jobs in my local market paying $65K more than I was making in 2008 for C or C++ developers. There are some paying C# developers that amount (I have one). I’m not bragging. According to all of the data I can gather, I’m making the median for my market for a “.Net Architect”.
Xorlev 8y ago
I'm not sure why the author is surprised about Ruby. Rails was the darling of startups for years and is probably still a common choice of backend. This data is also rife with bias: stackshare isn't representative of startups let alone companies in general.
- pard68 8y ago
  Also, Ruby has Jekyll which is probably close behind Wordpress (php) in terms of usage by blog/ecommerce.
joeax 8y ago
I don't think the MS stack is going anywhere. It's true that startups tend to avoid MS due to the (real or perceived) high upfront costs and its general lowness on the hipster curve, but once you look outside of SF/Bay Area it normalizes out, and you'll find plenty of .NET/C# jobs at tech/software companies in whatever city.
- guu 8y ago
  Now that .NET Core exists, it is possible to develop on the .NET stack without licensing fees (By hosting on Linux and using an open source database) or using a third party implementation (Mono). It remains to be seen whether this will help it gain traction with more companies or not though.
  - paulie_a 8y ago
    Yeah but why bother? Unless you have some legacy code and are forced to use c# I wouldn't waste my time anything Microsoft.
underwater 8y ago
Microsoft is doing their darnedest to own JavaScript as a language. TypeScript + VSCode is making inroads.
CyanLite2 8y ago
There's an overwhelming majority of developers who recently majored in CompSci or went to Bootcamps that have never touched a Microsoft development ecosystem, let alone Windows before. Schools/Camps are mostly teaching Python, JavaScript, or Java although that's starting to change now with .NET Core being open-source and cross platform and being one of the fastest frameworks out there on TechEmPower Benchmarks. I founded a startup on the Microsoft tech stack (.NET Core, VSTS, and Azure). Why? It's an incredibly productive dev/tooling environment that Java/Python/AWS doesn't even come close to. The downside? It's really hard to find good C# talent that isn't stuck in an enterprise development mindset.
- kitten_mittens_ 8y ago
  > It’s really hard to find good C# talent that isn’t stuck in an enterprise development mindset. I’ve found that C# devs manage quite well in F#, and the ergonomic way of doing things is sufficiently different to break people out of the 3+ levels of inheritance I’ve seen some small C# projects devolve into. That said, the community is smaller.
- vile 8y ago
  The flipside is also true; as a C# / MS stack focused developer myself, it's quite difficult to find satisfying work that isn't enterprisey, and it seems to be mostly because Microsoft isn't Cool.
  - imesh 8y ago
    The cost is something too. I enjoy developing in the Microsoft environment, but by using Microsoft you actually have to pay for your tools.
    - pjmlp 8y ago
      Like in other professions! What a strange thing! I enjoy being paid to develop software, so I also want the producers of my tools to be able to pay for their bills. I wonder how may that use FOSS on their business actually pay/donate anything, even a penny, to the developers. My experience consulting says pretty much no one.
ehnto 8y ago
Excluding 77 of the results because they were PHP and so probably "weren't software at all" is silly, to be polite. I understand the assumption is that they are probably ecommerce frameworks or WordPress sites but a) that's a pretty bad assumption and b) for an eCommerce framework, how is that not just part of the stack like any other framework? They are never off the shelf solutions at that scale, and surely it would be interesting to note that a majority of the top 100 were using a particular framework in the stack.
- InclinedPlane 8y ago
  All the more condescending considering some of the biggest software companies in the world (such as facebook) use PHP.
  - BillinghamJ 8y ago
    What Facebook use these days is a long way away from PHP. Hack is quite different in various non-trivial ways. The more typical “99th percentile” PHP is not used by any of the biggest tech companies to deliver their core products.
    - ehnto 8y ago
      PHP7 has closed the gap on Hack quite a bit.
      - geerlingguy 8y ago
        Yeah; the few people crazy enough to try to switch to Hack from vanilla PHP in the past few years just went to PHP 7, which is faster and fixed a number of the gripes devs had with PHP.
    - lucideer 8y ago
      > Hack is quite different in various non-trivial ways [citation needed]. In what non-trivial ways is Hack different to PHP? Of the three distinguishing features highlighted on https://hacklang.org/ https://hacklang.org/, PHP has two (the exception is generics, which I don't think PHP has added... yet).
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
peteforde 8y ago
It's weird that the author would include Shopify in a list of companies that don't create their own tools. Shopify is one of the most prolific technology creators in the tech community. Their CEO was on the original core Rails team and is directly responsible for several common libraries and concepts that have been picked up by other tools.
- pard68 8y ago
  Netflix too. Fairly certain they develop a fair amount of their own stuff in house.
kylec 8y ago
I think a lot of it is that there just aren't as many developers that know it compared to the other tech stacks. Part of the reason for that is that if you're starting out as a web developer trying to build stuff for fun, you're probably not picking .NET as your tech stack when there are options that are freer (both as in beer and in speech), easier/cheaper to deploy, and have a more active online community that can help you if you get stuck. And ultimately, if you're a company that is picking a tech stack, you ultimately need to hire people to work with that stack, and it's a lot easier to find people that know Node/PHP/React/whatever than it is to find people that know .NET.
marktolson 8y ago
I've been developing with .NET since 1.1. The initial appeal of ASP.NET WebForms was due to the fact that you could build software similarly to the way you build Windows desktop based apps. State was managed in an unmanaged environment. You didn't have to worry about varying browser capabilities / quirks due to the lack of standardisation at the time. Fast forward a few years and all of a sudden you have browser standards and amazing MVVM frameworks. Everything you needed ASP.NET for was no longer required. I still work on enterprise .NET systems and it's no surprise as to why startups look to alternatives. Sure the tooling is amazing but so are many of the other tools out there. After using simple web frameworks like AdonisJS I see no real reason for building your service layer (let alone your app layer) in .NET.
plaguuuuuu 8y ago
.NET is demonstrably a great environment (judging by effectiveness) and licensing is hardly an issue since .NET core. So it must be partly cultural. First of all, unless you have macbooks, you're not really a startup. and if you're a new developer who needs to pad out the CV, naturally you will be attracted to the most buzzwordy tech stack available - if it isn't dockerised scala->graphql->redis->whatever so you can code while you code, nobody's gonna hire you afterwards man. Also that awkward, sad reaction when you reveal to other burgeoning developers that you work in .NET
arc2 8y ago
As a Microsoft and all the closed-source software hater, I feel reassured
- Rjevski 8y ago
  I understand the hate on Microsoft given the recent abominations they produce (Windows 10, "improved" version of Skype, etc) but why the hate on closed-source software in general? People need to eat too.
RickJWagner 8y ago
.Net Core is fully supported on Red Hat Linux. If it gains serious traction, that could change the development landscape for a fair chunk of Enterprise development.
snarfy 8y ago
.NET is fine. Visual Studio is the de-facto IDE. Microsoft's problem has always been Windows. Software made for "A PC on every desk" doesn't fit so well into a wall of servers running the internet. They should have gave away Windows Server for free. Heck they should do it now. It should be as free as .net core.
- tonyedgecombe 8y ago
  Why would they give away a product that creates a substantial part of their revenue?
  - snarfy 8y ago
    Why install an Exchange server when I can use Office 365? Even Microsoft is cannibalizing their server offerings. Everybody is moving that stuff off prem. Windows server licensing doesn't make sense off prem.
    - tonyedgecombe 8y ago
      Everybody is moving that stuff off prem. Even if that does happen we are nowhere near it yet, there are a lot of servers out in corporate offices and will be for the foreseeable future. If this wasn't the case then Microsoft wouldn't be releasing new versions of Windows Server.
      - snarfy 8y ago
        I agree we aren't there yet, but I could see maybe a new sku? Windows Cloud Server or something similar. Windows Nano Server supposedly fits this bill, but businesses are going to want the real deal, not the stripped down nano version.
eksemplar 8y ago
It didn’t, it’s the backbone of a lot of enterprise companies and organizations that aren’t primarily focused on tech. Like most of the European public sector. Coincidentally, companies that aren’t tech companies rarely share their tech stacks, because why would they? Technology isn’t what they are selling and IT people are the guys who tell you to reboot every time you call them, even if that’s not really true. Take the municipality where I work as an example. I manage several software developers, and we’ve build around 400 minor systems and services over the past decade. Last year when I was working on my masters in public administration I discussed our in-house development with one our eight CEOs. This is the guy in charge of efficiency, which is where my digitization department resides, and while he knows me and what my department does in general terms, he was surprised to learn that we develop software ourselves. It’s different for Netflix and Airbnb, because they are tech companies and I’m fairly certain their CEOs know that they employ actual software developers. ;) That’s the public sector, but look up Volkswagen, Maersk or similar and notice how they don’t have entries?
m23khan 8y ago
I am sure if the website included majority of fortune 500 companies, then .NET usage would reflect favorably (it still won't overtake java but it would be up there). There is a place for technologies and associated stacks where the demand exists. The whole .NET and Microsoft ecosystem is super useful for large enterprises who have plethora of data and somehow need to accommodate employees who are both IT and non IT (think of typical IT Business Analysts and scrum masters and product owners -- they are usually involved with microsoft-based tools as I find it).
mattferderer 8y ago
If one could bet money & not just time/effort/knowledge on tech stacks, Microsoft's would be a great discount right now. They've been employing large amounts of very well known devs to become dev advocates in every popular language/field out there. Visual Studio Code has overtaken Sublime & Atom as the most popular text editor in just about any demo I see in most front side web development. MS is now friends & compatible with many of the other cool tools out there. MySQL, PostgreSQL, Linux, etc. A lot of demos I see use .NET with PostgreSQL on Linux. If you've never used Visual Studio's Full IDE or Azure or the .NET framework, you're missing out on some huge productivity gains. I use JavaScript more than .NET. I'm better at JS than .NET by far. I really dig hosts like Netlify. That said, if I need to spin up a MVP for a project, it's faster, better quality & easier with VS, Azure & .NET for me at least. Startups really underestimate this one I think. From what I've heard, it's also a great platform with Xamarin for mobile, with Unity for Games, etc. Add on the experimental work going on with compiling to Web Assembly & the .NET framework has a great chance to be running anywhere & everywhere.
- reitanqild 8y ago
  > If you've never used Visual Studio's Full IDE or ... you're missing out on some huge productivity gains. I've yet to see anything standard Visual Studio does better than Netbeans or JetBrains tools (besides language specific things) but I am yet again willing to be enlightened if someone can explain it to me. Background: I have months of experience with Visual Studio (more if you count back to school), months on IntelliJ and years on eclipse and Netbeans.
  - beagle3 8y ago
    Visual Studio / C++ 6.0 (from 1998!) was by far the best C++ environment at least until 2013 came out (The last version I used was VS2012) - You never had to wait for it even in 2000, when I first used it, and definitely not later. VS2005 (or 2008? can't remember), which I had to switch to because for x64 work, was unbearably slow and unresponsive in comparison -- although the general standards of responsiveness have come down, so today it might not be so bad (see, e.g., Atom, VSCode, everything JetBrains compared to old-guard Sublime) From my only-slightly-nostalgia-tinted experience, I would correct GP's post to say "If you've never used VC++6 full ide" ...
cmmartin 8y ago
Why are Javascript and Node.js different here? Especially considering this is back-end only. Who is using Javascript on the server without Node.js and how? I think they should probably be combined and if so, you would see absolute dominance by Node.js
AtlasBarfed 8y ago
More damning to me is that the stack components in a couple examples that aren't languages, such as databases (MySQL, Postgres, Mongo, Cassandra, Elasticsearch, etc), cache fabrics (Redis, memcached), tooling (Chef, Puppet, etc), data pipelines (Hadoop, ELK, etc)... None of it is written in .NET except for interface drivers. Java, the butt of all jokes, is responsible for a number of the key stack components, and C++ might not be a lingua franca of the startups, but foundational components are written in it. Can someone name a major OSS project/tool/database/etc that is written in C#?
illuminati1911 8y ago
When people say "Oh but now Visual Studio is free for small scale use, .NET core is officially supported on linux" etc. I really just have to ask one question: So what? This whole conversation somehow reminds me of the old iPhone vs Android conversations about 5-6 years ago when Android phones started catching up on iPhone in features such as non-lagginess etc. and people were like "So now Android has it too and you have no more excuses not to change to Android now!" Well...hahah...it doesn't really work that way. Even if Android could do everything that iPhone could...why would I still change? Why would I see all that trouble just to gain _NOTHING_. It's same with MS tech stack. Why would I change from tools I know and trust to MS stack when it would take time and money, but I wouldn't get anything? In addition MS has been fucking over people for about two decades and just because they have been seemingly friendly for last few years why would I trust them? Also if one were a software engineer, more or less experienced, and was thinking what tools to use, what do you think? Would he pick the tools used by top engineers and tech companies or embarrasing enterprise tools designed for senile bankers and municipality sinecures who are afraid of tech and want to use tools made by big company they have been repeatedly told since 1980s?

84 points by eadmund 8y ago

C++ is alive and well at all those companies, yet the bar chart shows zero. This immediately makes the rest of this “data” suspect.

saagarjha 8y ago
You were downvoted pretty quickly, but I agree with what you're saying: I don't trust this data. Out of curiousity, I searched up Apple. Of course I got Xcode, Swift, and Cocoa…but not much else. No mention of the hundreds of technologies Apple uses to keep its services (Maps, Siri, iCloud) running, no mention of even Objective-C, which probably outnumbers lines of Swift code ten to one. It seems like this website is just a collection of public perception about companies' tech stacks rather than being an accurate source.
- rovr138 8y ago
  Not sure if you need to work at a company before you can submit the data, but it also seems like this scans the website and GitHub repos you give it to identify the stacks. This seems like a bad source. Specially if anyone can submit a company they don’t work for and only use the url scan feature.

mikekij 8y ago

My company sells dev tools to software companies. Whenever I have talked to a startup about their tech stack and they reveal they’re on .NET, I later find out that none of the founders are technical, and they’ve outsourced development to Eastern Europe or India. This is not to say that a startup founded by technical people couldn’t be successful using .NET; I just haven’t seen it.

pnloyd 8y ago
Maybe not startups per say but. - jet.com uses F# - stackoverflow is C# I don't get why a startup couldn't just use .net for the application layer hooked up to a MySQL or Postgress backend. The drivers for both Db exist so someone must be doing it.
- maxxxxx 8y ago
  I work with C#/.NET but if I had to start from scratch I wouldn't use it. With a lot of platforms you are a second class citizen with .NET because most APIs get released as Java, Javascript or Python. The .NET version often comes much later. After working with MS for 20 years I am also not convinced they will sustain long term what they started with .NET Core. With a startup I would stick to open source. It's the more vibrant and reliable option.
  - CyanLite2 8y ago
    Lotsa FUD here.
    - maxxxxx 8y ago
      I think it help if you added some substance to your comment.
      - CyanLite2 8y ago
        .NET Core is open source and is the flagship development environment for Microsoft. They have no other alternative and have publicly announced multi-year roadmaps and support agreements spanning nearly the next decade.
        maxxxxx 8y ago
        I hope they will stick to it but after seeing what they did with Winforms, WPF, WinRT and Silverlight I have my doubts. We'll have to see.

a2tech 8y ago

It’s the licensing. It’s always been the licensing. The cost is untenable for startups (and yes I’m aware of the various bizspark and developer offerings). Those special deals are awesome in the beginning but they have nasty teeth when you’re two years in and you’ve just started to get traction and out of the blue you need to pony up for sql server or windows licenses.

hackits 8y ago
SQL Server/Windows Licenses costs shouldn't really be a problem if you've factor them into your business plan and expenses. The businesses that get into trouble are the ones that naively assume software is free.
- a2tech 8y ago
  They can be problematic if your growth doesn’t exactly match what your licensing growth plan is.
  - hackits 8y ago
    You shouldn't be in business if you don't know what your growth will be. That is all part of your business operation's and deployment strategy.
    - saagarjha 8y ago
      You might know exactly what your growth will be and realize that you cannot afford to license certain software after a certain point.
- ebikelaw 8y ago
  How do you figure in the chance that some birdbrain from Microsoft is going to call you up and demand that you participate in a "voluntary" audit of your license compliance, which you agreed to as a term of your Windows license agreement? I know many of you don't really remember the 90s, but Microsoft was and is evil. I wouldn't touch anything from them, or Oracle, with a ten-foot pole.

scarface74 8y ago

In 2008, I looked at where the market was going and decided to tie my horse to Microsoft, .Net and enterprise development. It’s been a good ride, but it’s clear that JS is eating the world. I’m slowly moving over more toward JS and Linux. I am taking a brief detour to Python and AWS though. I’m not touching Ruby. There are jobs for it but they don’t pay well.

finaliteration 8y ago
> I’m not touching Ruby though. There are jobs for it but they don’t pay well. Source? I know I’m an N of 1, but I just got hired to work on a Rails app and the pay and other benefits are pretty competitive...
- CyanLite2 8y ago
  Probably not in the same salary ballpark as that of a C# developer working on a line of business app for an enterprise shop.
  - finaliteration 8y ago
    According to the Stack Overflow survey results[0] Ruby actually comes out ahead of C# in terms of average salary. It’s also ahead of JavaScript. [0]https://insights.stackoverflow.com/survey/2017#top-paying-technologies https://insights.stackoverflow.com/survey/2017#top-paying-te...
    - scarface74 8y ago
      There is a balance between number of available jobs and the pay. Go is the top paying job but you may find yourself being unemployed for awhile or stuck at a job you don't want looking for Go jobs. Ruby may pay more but once you get to the higher end of the scale, you'll find many fewer jobs paying the amount you want. EDIT: In 2008, after being at one company way too long, I was what would be considered a top C developer and there was a company offering me $20K more than I was a making. But I saw the pickings were slim. There were more jobs paying the same amount for “Enterprise C# developers”. But I wasn’t qualified for them. I took a job paying only $7K more than I was making as a high entry level C# developer. 10 years later, there are no jobs in my local market paying $65K more than I was making in 2008 for C or C++ developers. There are some paying C# developers that amount (I have one). I’m not bragging. According to all of the data I can gather, I’m making the median for my market for a “.Net Architect”.

Xorlev 8y ago

I'm not sure why the author is surprised about Ruby. Rails was the darling of startups for years and is probably still a common choice of backend. This data is also rife with bias: stackshare isn't representative of startups let alone companies in general.

pard68 8y ago
Also, Ruby has Jekyll which is probably close behind Wordpress (php) in terms of usage by blog/ecommerce.

joeax 8y ago

I don't think the MS stack is going anywhere. It's true that startups tend to avoid MS due to the (real or perceived) high upfront costs and its general lowness on the hipster curve, but once you look outside of SF/Bay Area it normalizes out, and you'll find plenty of .NET/C# jobs at tech/software companies in whatever city.

guu 8y ago
Now that .NET Core exists, it is possible to develop on the .NET stack without licensing fees (By hosting on Linux and using an open source database) or using a third party implementation (Mono). It remains to be seen whether this will help it gain traction with more companies or not though.
- paulie_a 8y ago
  Yeah but why bother? Unless you have some legacy code and are forced to use c# I wouldn't waste my time anything Microsoft.

underwater 8y ago

Microsoft is doing their darnedest to own JavaScript as a language. TypeScript + VSCode is making inroads.

CyanLite2 8y ago

There's an overwhelming majority of developers who recently majored in CompSci or went to Bootcamps that have never touched a Microsoft development ecosystem, let alone Windows before. Schools/Camps are mostly teaching Python, JavaScript, or Java although that's starting to change now with .NET Core being open-source and cross platform and being one of the fastest frameworks out there on TechEmPower Benchmarks. I founded a startup on the Microsoft tech stack (.NET Core, VSTS, and Azure). Why? It's an incredibly productive dev/tooling environment that Java/Python/AWS doesn't even come close to. The downside? It's really hard to find good C# talent that isn't stuck in an enterprise development mindset.

kitten_mittens_ 8y ago
> It’s really hard to find good C# talent that isn’t stuck in an enterprise development mindset. I’ve found that C# devs manage quite well in F#, and the ergonomic way of doing things is sufficiently different to break people out of the 3+ levels of inheritance I’ve seen some small C# projects devolve into. That said, the community is smaller.
vile 8y ago
The flipside is also true; as a C# / MS stack focused developer myself, it's quite difficult to find satisfying work that isn't enterprisey, and it seems to be mostly because Microsoft isn't Cool.
- imesh 8y ago
  The cost is something too. I enjoy developing in the Microsoft environment, but by using Microsoft you actually have to pay for your tools.
  - pjmlp 8y ago
    Like in other professions! What a strange thing! I enjoy being paid to develop software, so I also want the producers of my tools to be able to pay for their bills. I wonder how may that use FOSS on their business actually pay/donate anything, even a penny, to the developers. My experience consulting says pretty much no one.

ehnto 8y ago

Excluding 77 of the results because they were PHP and so probably "weren't software at all" is silly, to be polite. I understand the assumption is that they are probably ecommerce frameworks or WordPress sites but a) that's a pretty bad assumption and b) for an eCommerce framework, how is that not just part of the stack like any other framework? They are never off the shelf solutions at that scale, and surely it would be interesting to note that a majority of the top 100 were using a particular framework in the stack.

InclinedPlane 8y ago
All the more condescending considering some of the biggest software companies in the world (such as facebook) use PHP.
- BillinghamJ 8y ago
  What Facebook use these days is a long way away from PHP. Hack is quite different in various non-trivial ways. The more typical “99th percentile” PHP is not used by any of the biggest tech companies to deliver their core products.
  - ehnto 8y ago
    PHP7 has closed the gap on Hack quite a bit.
    - geerlingguy 8y ago
      Yeah; the few people crazy enough to try to switch to Hack from vanilla PHP in the past few years just went to PHP 7, which is faster and fixed a number of the gripes devs had with PHP.
  - lucideer 8y ago
    > Hack is quite different in various non-trivial ways [citation needed]. In what non-trivial ways is Hack different to PHP? Of the three distinguishing features highlighted on https://hacklang.org/ https://hacklang.org/, PHP has two (the exception is generics, which I don't think PHP has added... yet).

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

peteforde 8y ago

It's weird that the author would include Shopify in a list of companies that don't create their own tools. Shopify is one of the most prolific technology creators in the tech community. Their CEO was on the original core Rails team and is directly responsible for several common libraries and concepts that have been picked up by other tools.

pard68 8y ago
Netflix too. Fairly certain they develop a fair amount of their own stuff in house.

kylec 8y ago

I think a lot of it is that there just aren't as many developers that know it compared to the other tech stacks. Part of the reason for that is that if you're starting out as a web developer trying to build stuff for fun, you're probably not picking .NET as your tech stack when there are options that are freer (both as in beer and in speech), easier/cheaper to deploy, and have a more active online community that can help you if you get stuck. And ultimately, if you're a company that is picking a tech stack, you ultimately need to hire people to work with that stack, and it's a lot easier to find people that know Node/PHP/React/whatever than it is to find people that know .NET.

marktolson 8y ago

I've been developing with .NET since 1.1. The initial appeal of ASP.NET WebForms was due to the fact that you could build software similarly to the way you build Windows desktop based apps. State was managed in an unmanaged environment. You didn't have to worry about varying browser capabilities / quirks due to the lack of standardisation at the time. Fast forward a few years and all of a sudden you have browser standards and amazing MVVM frameworks. Everything you needed ASP.NET for was no longer required. I still work on enterprise .NET systems and it's no surprise as to why startups look to alternatives. Sure the tooling is amazing but so are many of the other tools out there. After using simple web frameworks like AdonisJS I see no real reason for building your service layer (let alone your app layer) in .NET.

plaguuuuuu 8y ago

.NET is demonstrably a great environment (judging by effectiveness) and licensing is hardly an issue since .NET core. So it must be partly cultural. First of all, unless you have macbooks, you're not really a startup. and if you're a new developer who needs to pad out the CV, naturally you will be attracted to the most buzzwordy tech stack available - if it isn't dockerised scala->graphql->redis->whatever so you can code while you code, nobody's gonna hire you afterwards man. Also that awkward, sad reaction when you reveal to other burgeoning developers that you work in .NET

arc2 8y ago

As a Microsoft and all the closed-source software hater, I feel reassured

Rjevski 8y ago
I understand the hate on Microsoft given the recent abominations they produce (Windows 10, "improved" version of Skype, etc) but why the hate on closed-source software in general? People need to eat too.

RickJWagner 8y ago

.Net Core is fully supported on Red Hat Linux. If it gains serious traction, that could change the development landscape for a fair chunk of Enterprise development.

snarfy 8y ago

.NET is fine. Visual Studio is the de-facto IDE. Microsoft's problem has always been Windows. Software made for "A PC on every desk" doesn't fit so well into a wall of servers running the internet. They should have gave away Windows Server for free. Heck they should do it now. It should be as free as .net core.

tonyedgecombe 8y ago
Why would they give away a product that creates a substantial part of their revenue?
- snarfy 8y ago
  Why install an Exchange server when I can use Office 365? Even Microsoft is cannibalizing their server offerings. Everybody is moving that stuff off prem. Windows server licensing doesn't make sense off prem.
  - tonyedgecombe 8y ago
    Everybody is moving that stuff off prem. Even if that does happen we are nowhere near it yet, there are a lot of servers out in corporate offices and will be for the foreseeable future. If this wasn't the case then Microsoft wouldn't be releasing new versions of Windows Server.
    - snarfy 8y ago
      I agree we aren't there yet, but I could see maybe a new sku? Windows Cloud Server or something similar. Windows Nano Server supposedly fits this bill, but businesses are going to want the real deal, not the stripped down nano version.

eksemplar 8y ago

It didn’t, it’s the backbone of a lot of enterprise companies and organizations that aren’t primarily focused on tech. Like most of the European public sector. Coincidentally, companies that aren’t tech companies rarely share their tech stacks, because why would they? Technology isn’t what they are selling and IT people are the guys who tell you to reboot every time you call them, even if that’s not really true. Take the municipality where I work as an example. I manage several software developers, and we’ve build around 400 minor systems and services over the past decade. Last year when I was working on my masters in public administration I discussed our in-house development with one our eight CEOs. This is the guy in charge of efficiency, which is where my digitization department resides, and while he knows me and what my department does in general terms, he was surprised to learn that we develop software ourselves. It’s different for Netflix and Airbnb, because they are tech companies and I’m fairly certain their CEOs know that they employ actual software developers. ;) That’s the public sector, but look up Volkswagen, Maersk or similar and notice how they don’t have entries?

m23khan 8y ago

I am sure if the website included majority of fortune 500 companies, then .NET usage would reflect favorably (it still won't overtake java but it would be up there). There is a place for technologies and associated stacks where the demand exists. The whole .NET and Microsoft ecosystem is super useful for large enterprises who have plethora of data and somehow need to accommodate employees who are both IT and non IT (think of typical IT Business Analysts and scrum masters and product owners -- they are usually involved with microsoft-based tools as I find it).

mattferderer 8y ago

If one could bet money & not just time/effort/knowledge on tech stacks, Microsoft's would be a great discount right now. They've been employing large amounts of very well known devs to become dev advocates in every popular language/field out there. Visual Studio Code has overtaken Sublime & Atom as the most popular text editor in just about any demo I see in most front side web development. MS is now friends & compatible with many of the other cool tools out there. MySQL, PostgreSQL, Linux, etc. A lot of demos I see use .NET with PostgreSQL on Linux. If you've never used Visual Studio's Full IDE or Azure or the .NET framework, you're missing out on some huge productivity gains. I use JavaScript more than .NET. I'm better at JS than .NET by far. I really dig hosts like Netlify. That said, if I need to spin up a MVP for a project, it's faster, better quality & easier with VS, Azure & .NET for me at least. Startups really underestimate this one I think. From what I've heard, it's also a great platform with Xamarin for mobile, with Unity for Games, etc. Add on the experimental work going on with compiling to Web Assembly & the .NET framework has a great chance to be running anywhere & everywhere.

reitanqild 8y ago
> If you've never used Visual Studio's Full IDE or ... you're missing out on some huge productivity gains. I've yet to see anything standard Visual Studio does better than Netbeans or JetBrains tools (besides language specific things) but I am yet again willing to be enlightened if someone can explain it to me. Background: I have months of experience with Visual Studio (more if you count back to school), months on IntelliJ and years on eclipse and Netbeans.
- beagle3 8y ago
  Visual Studio / C++ 6.0 (from 1998!) was by far the best C++ environment at least until 2013 came out (The last version I used was VS2012) - You never had to wait for it even in 2000, when I first used it, and definitely not later. VS2005 (or 2008? can't remember), which I had to switch to because for x64 work, was unbearably slow and unresponsive in comparison -- although the general standards of responsiveness have come down, so today it might not be so bad (see, e.g., Atom, VSCode, everything JetBrains compared to old-guard Sublime) From my only-slightly-nostalgia-tinted experience, I would correct GP's post to say "If you've never used VC++6 full ide" ...

cmmartin 8y ago

Why are Javascript and Node.js different here? Especially considering this is back-end only. Who is using Javascript on the server without Node.js and how? I think they should probably be combined and if so, you would see absolute dominance by Node.js

AtlasBarfed 8y ago

More damning to me is that the stack components in a couple examples that aren't languages, such as databases (MySQL, Postgres, Mongo, Cassandra, Elasticsearch, etc), cache fabrics (Redis, memcached), tooling (Chef, Puppet, etc), data pipelines (Hadoop, ELK, etc)... None of it is written in .NET except for interface drivers. Java, the butt of all jokes, is responsible for a number of the key stack components, and C++ might not be a lingua franca of the startups, but foundational components are written in it. Can someone name a major OSS project/tool/database/etc that is written in C#?

illuminati1911 8y ago

When people say "Oh but now Visual Studio is free for small scale use, .NET core is officially supported on linux" etc. I really just have to ask one question: So what? This whole conversation somehow reminds me of the old iPhone vs Android conversations about 5-6 years ago when Android phones started catching up on iPhone in features such as non-lagginess etc. and people were like "So now Android has it too and you have no more excuses not to change to Android now!" Well...hahah...it doesn't really work that way. Even if Android could do everything that iPhone could...why would I still change? Why would I see all that trouble just to gain _NOTHING_. It's same with MS tech stack. Why would I change from tools I know and trust to MS stack when it would take time and money, but I wouldn't get anything? In addition MS has been fucking over people for about two decades and just because they have been seemingly friendly for last few years why would I trust them? Also if one were a software engineer, more or less experienced, and was thinking what tools to use, what do you think? Would he pick the tools used by top engineers and tech companies or embarrasing enterprise tools designed for senile bankers and municipality sinecures who are afraid of tech and want to use tools made by big company they have been repeatedly told since 1980s?