The article mentions it, but I'll reiterate: the .NET CLR is fantastic. C# is a great language for the backend: GC'd, lots of libraries, fast runtime, and expre

The article mentions it, but I'll reiterate: the .NET CLR is fantastic. C# is a great language for the backend: GC'd, lots of libraries, fast runtime, and expressive enough. Do I wish it was more functional? Absolutely. But it doesn't aspire to be that. The ecosystem deserves mention. There are some high-quality libraries that work well, even if they aren't the most popular. Take objectional relational mappers, for instance. You can go whole hog and have an ultra-coupled, er, cough, "batteries-included" ORM much like every other ecosystem, or experiment with a multitude of options between writing your own SQL but letting the ORM handle hydration, and a full-blown ORM. Tooling support has always been top of the line, too. It is only in the past few years that other languages have caught up with the quality there (Eclipse/IntelliJ excepted).