4 ms·

After seeing a few blogs like this, I was starting to get the general impression that C# and .NET were dying out. However, according to the TIOBE Index [1], C#

After seeing a few blogs like this, I was starting to get the general impression that C# and .NET were dying out. However, according to the TIOBE Index [1], C# was actually second in growth in 2011, just behind Objective C. Not sure how reliable that is, but thought it was an interesting (and unexpected) trend. [1] http://www.tiobe.com/index.php/content/paperinfo/tpci/index.html http://www.tiobe.com/index.php/content/paperinfo/tpci/index....

dexen 15y ago
Influx of new developers != increasing utility of the language, especially for seasoned devs. As the OP notes, It seems as though the whole philosophy of .NET centres on catering to the novice, but even as the novice evolves into the “advanced beginner” they inevitably find they want and need more.
- elemeno 15y ago
  With everything that's been and being added to C#, I'd argue that it keeps getting more and more interesting for experienced developers and further away from novices. Your typical novice developer is going to have a hell of a time trying to understand any non-trivial C# projects these days with all the function features that have been added - especially with things like PLINQ and TPL. The utility for experienced developers has increased over the years, it's accessibly to inexperienced developers has, however, decreased.
- recoiledsnake 15y ago
  I think the argument is about viability of a career choice. New developers don't come up in a vacuum if there's no demand, they'll quickly switch to something that pays the bills. Is there any indicator(other than a few HN posts) that .NET (or # of seasoned devs in .NET) is actually in decline?
tikhonj 15y ago
I think there's some significant selection bias on HN, particularly against Windows and Microsoft. It seems a disproportionate amount of the people here are using Python/Ruby on OS X, so naturally you'll get more articles about moving to that sort of stack and away from .NET and the like than the opposite. In reality, .NET is actually a very interesting platform. LINQ is actually really cool and C# is largely a better language than Java. If this isn't enough, you can always use F# which is a very nice functional, statically typed language based on OCaml. On top of this, MSR produces interesting research in programming languages, which can easily be subsumed by their product languages. There is actually a healthy exchange of ideas between Haskell and the .NET languages, for example, even going both ways. (Haskell recently got some features from LINQ, for example.)
- deleted 15y ago
  [deleted]
- thesz 15y ago
  What are those LINQ features you're talking about?
  - tikhonj 15y ago
    I was particularly thinking about things like order and group in list comprehensions[1]. Turns out the paper introducing them was actually from 2007, so maybe it's not that recent :). (I thought it was newer than that.) [1]: http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/people/simonpj/papers/list-comp/list-comp.pdf http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/people/simonpj/papers... Here is a random video I found earlier where SPJ talks both about this in particular and the exchange of ideas between Haskell and .NET in general: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iSmkqocn0oQ http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iSmkqocn0oQ
recoiledsnake 15y ago
>After seeing a few blogs like this The reason you see blogs like this that some in HN reflexively vote up anything that is anti-.NET or anti-MS. Around a 50% use Macs and a significant percentage use Ruby, Node et al. Since people tend to vote up things that make them feel good, 'OMG .NET IS TEH SUX' posts tend to get on top.

dexen 15y ago

Influx of new developers != increasing utility of the language, especially for seasoned devs. As the OP notes, It seems as though the whole philosophy of .NET centres on catering to the novice, but even as the novice evolves into the “advanced beginner” they inevitably find they want and need more.

elemeno 15y ago
With everything that's been and being added to C#, I'd argue that it keeps getting more and more interesting for experienced developers and further away from novices. Your typical novice developer is going to have a hell of a time trying to understand any non-trivial C# projects these days with all the function features that have been added - especially with things like PLINQ and TPL. The utility for experienced developers has increased over the years, it's accessibly to inexperienced developers has, however, decreased.
recoiledsnake 15y ago
I think the argument is about viability of a career choice. New developers don't come up in a vacuum if there's no demand, they'll quickly switch to something that pays the bills. Is there any indicator(other than a few HN posts) that .NET (or # of seasoned devs in .NET) is actually in decline?

tikhonj 15y ago

I think there's some significant selection bias on HN, particularly against Windows and Microsoft. It seems a disproportionate amount of the people here are using Python/Ruby on OS X, so naturally you'll get more articles about moving to that sort of stack and away from .NET and the like than the opposite. In reality, .NET is actually a very interesting platform. LINQ is actually really cool and C# is largely a better language than Java. If this isn't enough, you can always use F# which is a very nice functional, statically typed language based on OCaml. On top of this, MSR produces interesting research in programming languages, which can easily be subsumed by their product languages. There is actually a healthy exchange of ideas between Haskell and the .NET languages, for example, even going both ways. (Haskell recently got some features from LINQ, for example.)

deleted 15y ago
[deleted]
thesz 15y ago
What are those LINQ features you're talking about?
- tikhonj 15y ago
  I was particularly thinking about things like order and group in list comprehensions[1]. Turns out the paper introducing them was actually from 2007, so maybe it's not that recent :). (I thought it was newer than that.) [1]: http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/people/simonpj/papers/list-comp/list-comp.pdf http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/people/simonpj/papers... Here is a random video I found earlier where SPJ talks both about this in particular and the exchange of ideas between Haskell and .NET in general: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iSmkqocn0oQ http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iSmkqocn0oQ

recoiledsnake 15y ago

>After seeing a few blogs like this The reason you see blogs like this that some in HN reflexively vote up anything that is anti-.NET or anti-MS. Around a 50% use Macs and a significant percentage use Ruby, Node et al. Since people tend to vote up things that make them feel good, 'OMG .NET IS TEH SUX' posts tend to get on top.