20 ms·

Why isn’t dotnet core popular among startups?

48 points by bundie 3y ago

PreInternet01 3y ago
Previously submitted and discussed: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37476823 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37476823
keltex 3y ago
I think the indended link was: https://old.reddit.com/r/dotnet/comments/16fu7o0/why_isnt_dotnet_core_popular_among_startups/ https://old.reddit.com/r/dotnet/comments/16fu7o0/why_isnt_do...
- bundie 3y ago
  Hacker News messed up the link
  - ChrisArchitect 3y ago
    [dupe] anyways https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37476823 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37476823
KingLancelot 3y ago
[dead]
edgyquant 3y ago
Why would you use C# if starting a company/project today? I know C# fans love it, but seriously why not choose a community driven language over one controlled by microsoft?
- CharlieDigital 3y ago
  What do you see as the issue being "controlled by microsoft"? What risk do you see here?
  - AlecSchueler 3y ago
    There was a good discussion just yesterday, "Why did Visual Basic die?" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37470318 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37470318 That might be a place to start looking. It basically comes down to:b they could take development in any direction and the community of users is powerless.
    - jodrellblank 3y ago
      But why can't you fork it and take it in the direction you want? The situation is literally no different from Python or Node or Ruby, the people running the most popular distribution could take it in a direction you don't like and the power you have (or the only option you have) is forking.
      - AlecSchueler 3y ago
        The development for a language like python happens entirely in public though, and is driven by consensus.
        jodrellblank 3y ago
        https://github.com/dotnet/csharplang https://github.com/dotnet/csharplang - "The official repo for the design of the C# programming language" that's in public.
        AlecSchueler 3y ago
        Infront of the public, yes, but it says you need to be invited by someone from their team to participate yourself, compare that with the python process. There's a distinction to be made between doing something in public and something being done by the public.
    - HelloNurse 3y ago
      For .Net, there's an established pattern of careless deprecation that produced enough frameworks to date codebases like tree rings: - this year's correct way to access your database is... - this year's correct way to serve dynamic web pages is... - this year's correct way to make a Windows GUI is...
- VHRanger 3y ago
  I wouldn't use it personally because I use other languages, but C# is perfectly fine? It's basically Java without most of the bad parts. It's a very well designed language that fits most niches (fast, compiled, familiar syntax, feature rich, adopts recent PL concepts, etc.)
  - sanderjd 3y ago
    Yeah every time I use C# a bit, I just have to laugh a little bit in comparison with java (which I've used a lot more); it reminds me of nothing so much as reading a first draft, and then reading a final version of the same thing after it's been worked over by a good editor.
  - jmaker 3y ago
    To me it’s not about the language, I can anytime switch to Kotlin or Scala, even Clojure but I don’t do LISP. To me it’s mostly about the developer experience, build tools and the simplicity in the ops. In JVM there’s so many moving pieces and knobs to control, it’s so brittle. I can live with the trap field in Java the language that’s justified by backwards compatibility. But I prefer to let juniors steer away from Java to Kotlin so they avoid all those traps. I love Java and the JVM for the versatility and the variation. But Java steals too much productive time and eats up too much RAM. And every new praised feature comes with many caveats because the OpenJDK folks want to keep it backwards compatible and carry on all that dangerous garbage resulting from the many bad design decision made in the past. Virtual threads come with many caveats. Pattern matching too. The Panama FFI has been underwhelming. The value types proposal is kinda weird. GraalVM is great on paper but have you met someone satisfied with it in production? It’s nice you can, in principle, embed an R, JS, Python, Ruby and Java runtime on it in the same app, but does it actually work in production? It’s all praised to the infinity but it just doesn’t work right in production. And what’s dangerous - the caveats are not advertised at all, you really need to be very cautious and follow all the relevant Oracle talks and discussions here and on Reddit just to not endanger your software. Do you really believe that an average Java developer can cope with all that sheer complexity? For example, pron might tell you virtual threads are fine but do you have the budget to even invite him on your team? Yes, obviously, you don’t have to be one of the developers of the Virtual Threads to use them appropriately, and they gave their best to make the APIs as user friendly as they could, which few really appreciate. My point is that it’s only the tip of the iceberg that many people talk about when they discuss languages. This may come as an unpopular opinion but that’s just my experience. So, no, C# is not “basically Java”—it began as such and perhaps a decade ago that would be a good assessment. But today, C# is a robust language in its own right. You can also choose F# or VB if you like, they all run on the same CLR, like the JVM languages. And .NET is a full-fledged robust and comprehensive framework. There’s much less variability in the correctness and cohesion of the implementations across the .NET ecosystem—already because there’s much fewer moving parts and knobs to control. And .NET apps use much less memory for the same throughput and latency than JVM apps. In addition, as for DX, EF Core is much more efficient and straightforward than Hibernate and Spring Data JPA, and so on. It just works.
- mdgrech23 3y ago
  I still despise Microsoft but I'm old although I'm old but I think most people on here too. They do make some good development products VSCode and Github in particular but I'd still rather avoid them as much as possible.
  - philipov 3y ago
    Saying Microsoft "makes" GitHub is quite a stretch. Microsoft owns GitHub. They did not make it. https://i.kym-cdn.com/photos/images/newsfeed/001/079/173/ed2.png https://i.kym-cdn.com/photos/images/newsfeed/001/079/173/ed2...
- ubermonkey 3y ago
  If you're building Windows software, then you might find it easier to use the Windows-native stack. If you're not, then I'm not sure what the appeal would be. I work for a company in the former space. We have no intention of supporting nonWindows clients or nonWindows servers or even nonSQLServer DBs. It's not worth doing from a commercial perspective in our particular market. Consequently, it's C# and .NET.
  - paddim8 3y ago
    .NET has great crossplatform support anyway
  - CharlieDigital 3y ago
    I do all of my .NET work on a Mac and deploy to Linux -- both x64 and Arm64 -- on the daily.
    - ubermonkey 3y ago
      Wow, really? That's wild to me.
      - jmaker 3y ago
        Yeah, I’ve run the same dev setup since the M1 came out. Totally stable and robust. Nothing wild at all. Every .NET dev who’s on an ARM Mac today is most likely doing the same. If you like you can run Windows ARM in a VM on the same Mac if you want to run native WinUI, WPF, etc. GUI or anything Win32 specific.
      - CharlieDigital 3y ago
        There are some tradeoffs, but some really key benefits which make it worth it. Tradeoffs: - You'll have to use Rider if you want a full IDE - Or get used to VS Code and know its gaps - Some workloads aren't as well supported in VSC (e.g. MAUI, desktop apps); as long as you don't need these, VSC is fine - I know at least the CosmosDB emulator straight up does not work in ARM, even with the x64 emulation on the Docker image. Has been that way since M1 released. - Occasionally, you'll run into issues where there are dependencies on x64 binaries like with Google OR-Tools which has a .NET wrapper around a C++ library. - Have to get used to configuring cross-platform builds for .NET and Docker (not hard) since you'll often still be running in x64 environments in upstream cloud deploy targets. - Terrible multi-monitor support; you'll need a $250+ DisplayLink capable dock for more than 2 screens. - And the text doesn't render quite as crisp as Windows; might be that it would if I were using Apple monitors, but the same monitors are notably more crisp with Windows 11. Benefits: - PHENOMENAL battery life; for this alone, it was worth the switch. It's insane how good the battery life is for the performance. I've previously used top-of-the-line Dell Precision mobile workstations and the performance for the battery life on ARM64 is just unmatched. I can run Postgres (in Docker), a handful of Docker images, VS Code, and code on a cross-country flight - The form factor is phenomenal. The same size as a Microsoft Surface 13.5" laptop but has 3 USB-C ports and an HDMI port. Of course, the phenomenal performance and battery life listed above - The laptop is absolutely silent; never hear the fan kick on. I can be compiling away, running a Node-powered front-end dev runtime, a .NET web API, Docker containers -- never hear a damn thing. Coding in complete silence is kind of crazy. - Stays relatively cool and never reaches the same temps as a Windows Intel laptop Some lessons learned: - It takes a while to remap your brain for KB shortcuts; get Karabiner to save your sanity - Download iTerm; it's like Windows Terminal - If you switch to VSC, you need to commit to it and get used to the CLI
- hardware2win 3y ago
  Because ecosystem is less fragmented which makes day to day job pleasant C# has best tooling on the market, by far. Btw. C# has huge oss community
  - barumrho 3y ago
    One could argue that fragmentation is a sign of more active development and a cause for excitement. Of course, it comes with less stability/maturity, but it means that everyone is empowered to do their own thing. Huge cultural difference.
    - hardware2win 3y ago
      Both sides have pros and cons But for some reasons ppl that argue for fragmentation under umbrella of innovation never talk about sane experience, especially for newbies
    - hahn-kev 3y ago
      Yeah because the fragmentation of the JS ecosystem is such a great feature
      - hardware2win 3y ago
        Especially in the world of supply chain attacks
- easton 3y ago
  TypeScript is also controlled by MS and that has tons of community support. Sure, if things got evil someone would fork/reimplement, but right now Microsoft decides how the language goes for the most part. And for writing C# on the server, the major benefit is that Microsoft has a batteries included web framework that’s very battle tested. There’s at least one good first party answer for every problem (auth, database connections, caching, etc) which is very nice as compared to finding 30 npm packages to try to put stuff together. And C# is a pretty nice type-safe language that’s as fast if not faster than Java. As for the front-end scene? Yuck. That’s a big ol mess in .NET right now.
  - marcosdumay 3y ago
    But there is a very compelling reason to use TypeScript. There isn't one for C#. (And, oh man, that batteries included battle tested framework is a stinky pile of trash. The language itself is ok, but the framework uses every misguided trend somebody at MS thought as cool, has no documentation of them, and implements half of them in some way that only that person thought about. There is a passable "web framework" inside it, but you have to ignore the MS recommendations and know what tons of pieces to discard, also, it's not very batteries included, because the batteries are almost all poisonous.)
    - jmaker 3y ago
      This is kinda totally off. You could say that about Spring and Pivotal/Tanzu/VMware or even Quarkus and Red Hat, or just IBM. In my experience though those words apply best to much of the Python and Rust landscape. You could say much more about the Node landscape. But .NET and ASP? Really? Could you substantiate?
    - andomggazzz662 3y ago
      I find the opposite to be the case in all honesty. I've never used C# or dotnet core but I know from word of mouth that it is a relatively well put together framework of tools for doing a lot of the things organizations with a lot of backend services to write might need. Many of those orgs are already very locked in with Microsoft, so the greater support by the open source community that comes with typescript is mostly irrelevant. Whatever the officially supported version of something is is what you will be required to use, and the typescript ecosystem provides very little if you want some big company to declare one particular thing to be the blessed solution.
- skinnyarms 3y ago
  Why not? It's a great mix of productivity and power and the Microsoft/Azure ecosystem works really well together. You can go with dynamic languages if you're flying fast and loose, or native languages like Go/Rust if you are worried about performance but you miss out on the "enterprise" integrations of something like Java or .Net. Speaking of Java, it's great too but the ecosystem is a jungle. It's more flexible, but that flexibility has a cost too and you'll spend a lot of time frustrated trying to figure out the right combination of configs in xml, toml, yaml, json, env, properties, etc files.
- bob1029 3y ago
  We like the fact that it's pay to play and controlled by one big org. There is a strong financial incentive to keep current customers locked-in and happy. This aligns well with our business model which involves b2b software contracts that last 5+ years. They don't always get this right but if you are careful you can get a codebase to survive 10-15 years under Microsoft without too much suffering. If you latch on to every shiny new thing they release (cough MAUI cough), then you will find yourself despising Microsoft. Stick to the basics and a vendor like Microsoft can take you to the moon with zero drama.
- antiloper 3y ago
  Your mileage may vary but my opinion: Because its controlled by Microsoft. ASP.NET Core brings everything necessary to develop a web application, from an ORM, to a web server, to a router, to an HTML templating language, to a client-side SPA framework. All components are designed to work together and have high quality documentation. That makes it easier to get started than say Python where you have to depend on multiple third party libraries with different support cycles, API styles, or even async programming models (e.g. gevent vs async/await in Python). And you can still swap components out if needed. Not saying Rust or Python etc. are bad for writing startup software. Given the ecosystems I personally find it faster to get started with .NET because of the reasons above.
- Const-me 3y ago
  I don’t care who controls what if the technology in question is technically good, and it comes with a good enough license. Here’s two examples. For embedded Linux, .NET runtime delivers memory safety for high-level pieces, great support for networking and multithreading, combined with simple unmanaged interop for low-level pieces. The lower-level parts of the software I made were in C++ to consume OS APIs not exposed to C# like drm/kms/egl, also to implement a few performance-critical functions in C++ with NEON SIMD. For a web service running on Linux: the same binary runs on my development amd64 Windows and the target aarch64 Linux which makes it easy to develop and test stuff. Asp.net framework is first party, stable, and mature. The runtime is relatively small and is trivial to deploy. That project didn’t use C++ at all; the complete server is implemented in memory-safe managed code, good for security.
- elorant 3y ago
  Because MS provides superb documentation and backwards compatibility. Everything you write now will still compile after 20 years.
barumrho 3y ago
Isn't it because it was tied to Windows? My impression still is that the ecosystem is not as well supported outside of Windows. Similar problem with Swift even though it started out as an open source project. The ties to Apple OSes are hard to break and ignore.
- easton 3y ago
  Linux support is pretty good now. We only run it on Linux at work for web apps, works just as well as Node or whatever.
  - barumrho 3y ago
    How about things like IDE and related development tools? Same level of support on Linux?
    - ImPleadThe5th 3y ago
      Rider (from JetBrains) is basically the go to IDE for most .net/c# devs I've met professionally. VisualStudio has come a long way but Rider is just chefs kiss. And it is available on all platforms. It used to use IIS express to run its applications locally (it has meh cross platform support) now it by default uses docker when bootstrapping a new application. I've only ever developed for it on windows and very minimally on Linux, but I did not feel that the experience was worse on Linux.
    - deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
- ImPleadThe5th 3y ago
  Unfortunately the perception remains, but its been platform agnostic since like 2016. I think it deserves some of the hate it gets for its previous state, but it is really a pleasure to work with these days. My current job is a kotlin shop and I miss .net/c# a lot.
  - 3y ago
nsonha 3y ago
Do people actually like C#? It seems like a really bloated language with a ton of features.
- qingcharles 3y ago
  Yes, it's an excellent development language, IMO. I honestly preferred VB.NET, but I'll settle for C#. It has great community support, great libraries too. This is coming from someone who started out writing x86 assembler and has been coding on almost every platform known to man for the last 40 years.
- naasking 3y ago
  Features are not bloat if they address real issues.
- yonaguska 3y ago
  I actually enjoy it. And this is coming from someone that spent a lot of time in C, assembler, lisp, Scala, Java, and so on....C# is much nicer than it used to be, and gets out of the way. Tooling is so much better than it was just 5 years ago. I'm using rider on an m2 with no issues. Of course it's not free- regular vs2022 won't even open on a mac. Most of the things I don't like about C# mostly have to do with the community and the average C# developer. Even the documentation, which used to just suck, is getting better.
  - donny2018 3y ago
    >I'm using rider on an m2 with no issues. Of course it's not free I just don't understand the "Rider is not free" thing. Just come on now, guys. It's like $15 a month, a price of 1 good meal pretty much anywhere in the world. In my 3rd world country, even students could afford it. If you earn money with code, it should be no brainer. If you are a someone who is just learning and hacking around, or just want everything to be free forever, then VS Code with C# DevKit is more than adequate, you can even do professional work with it. I'm saying this assuming you are on Mac/Linux. On Windows, the powerful (and free) VS Community Edition will get you covered, unless your revenue exceeds 1M, in which case you probably can afford the VS Professional license.
INTPenis 3y ago
As a lifetime Linux user, I think it's obvious. A startup is about getting a product out to market as soon as possible, and hopefully as cheaply as possible, which can best be done with open and freely available tools. When I'm in the zone, my creativity is flowing, the last thing I need is to register on some website, or to purchase a license.
- hardware2win 3y ago
  How is this even related to dotnet? All you need to type is some apt get dotn... and you can go
  - INTPenis 3y ago
    Then I guess Microsoft have a long way to come in destroying old stigmas about their software and ecosystem. I was actually devops for a .net project at my $dayjob, and I noticed the nuget repositories we setup in Gitlab for the developers. So I could tell that a lot of my preconceptions about .net are probably wrong. But I'd still prefer any other language like Python, Rust, Golang, Nodejs just because I'm afraid of running into some enterprise wall in their historic walled garden. It's so damn frustrating to run into tooling issues, and when they stem from ruthless capitalism it seems even more frustrating than simple package management issues with npm for example. At least I can always check the source code. ;)
    - hardware2win 3y ago
      >It's so damn frustrating to run into tooling issues, and when they stem from ruthless capitalism it seems even more frustrating than simple package management issues with npm for example. At least I can always check the source code. ;) https://source.dot.net https://source.dot.net or github >than simple package management issues with npm Unlike js, Microsoft has shitton of stuff in std, so no need for 3rd :)
  - fennecfired 3y ago
    You edited your comment, but the comparison of Microsoft to Oracle is pretty fitting. They're both the worst of the worst.
pluto_modadic 3y ago
oh lord. Not just a meme language as discussed, but the language and framework design decisions alone are bad enough. add onto that the business heads who think they should use C# for their startup also bring legacy enterprise ideas with them that won't work...
- skwirl 3y ago
  C# is one of the best designed languages that I've had the pleasure to use.
  - Woshiwuja 3y ago
    Except it's a java copy. And java sucks
    - skwirl 3y ago
      Have you ever actually written software professionally? I get strong teenage vibes from your comment history.
      - nsonha 3y ago
        A big part of why java sucks is that you get failed software engineers to teach them at universities, and teenages took their crappy code and think that's representative of java or programming as a whole even.
        Woshiwuja 3y ago
        I swear i heard the lecture about class at least 10 times. Also most of interaction i had with java was working with legacy software. Not great.
        Woshiwuja 3y ago
        Java server pages is evil.
glutamate 3y ago
My 2¢: if they really wanted to light up adoption, release a TypeScript compiler. I don't mean to JavaScript but TS to CLR. C# is already so close to TypeScript. And the TS ecosystem and mindshare is huge
taxman22 3y ago
You should use the best tool for the job, and if that's dotnet go for it. That said, it would be difficult to hire strong engineers, across all experience levels. Your team would probably skew older and have outdated engineering practices.
- fennecfired 3y ago
  You should use the best tool for the job, but also consider the ramifications of supporting monopolies/cronyism and exclude those options.
olavgg 3y ago
I recently launched a startup, we use Java, some Python and even a little bit of Rust. For web we also use plain Javascript. We will most likely add some GoLang and C/C++ for specific problems we need to solve in the future. But using C# .Net? It's completely irrelevant, it adds absolutely nothing. The performance is similar to Java. The syntax is similar to Java. But the eco-system is one of the smallest of all the big programming languages. And most of the documentation/blog posts about C# is heavily Windows focused, and we run only on Linux. The only reason I think of why I should use C# is when we need a Windows-based desktop application. But I think Java+JavaFX will be just as good and will also work great on MacOS and Linux desktop.
- hahn-kev 3y ago
  I can't tell if this is serious that you're a startup using 3 languages with plans to use 2 more. I'm not saying that those might be the best tool for the job, but the complexity to manage that whole build chain sounds crazy overkill complicated for what amounts to premature optimization using all those languages
  - jmaker 3y ago
    While I agree with you that such complexity is expensive to manage, I think it primarily depends on the expertise of your team. If you can foresee the need for Rust, say, and your team knows how to manage its risks, and it is financially viable to maintain so many stacks, I think it’s fine. But if the team just wants to put a badge on their chest for using Rust, that’s a different story. I’ve been always striving to reduce the complexity and pick only one framework. Sometimes it’s hard and such decisions must be made. On a larger project I integrated and developed Go, Rust, and Java services, tightly knit to their context bounds. It was alright and seemed to make sense but the strain was immense. People tend to underappreciate how much time it costs to do the context switch in your head when you change across different stacks, and how much lost opportunity it incurs for not spending that time to dice deeper in only one tech stack.
  - olavgg 3y ago
    I can explain why. Java is great for web, api's and most things. But Java is not really that great for doing data science. Python is great for data science, the Python community has put a great effort making Python "The place to be for Data Science" and Rust helps us speed up heavy tasks that are too slow with Python. It is not really crazy complicated, it's simple stuff that is very well documented. We try choose the right tool for the job, and we don't care about which language we use. If we tried to do everything in Java, we would spent at least 2x more time on building our software.
shrubble 3y ago
Their idea of a long term release is 3 years, for one, which can cause maintainability headaches. Second, portability across Unix platforms is low - the current release doesn't even run on FreeBSD .
thecodrr 3y ago
I don't think that's true. We have been using ASP .NET Core + SignalR for everything in Notesnook[0]. It has great performance, libraries for everything out there, very good ergonomics, and a mature ecosystem. I know you can probably get more performance out of Rust or Go but I don't think rq/s benchmarks really hold up in reality. If you are running a startup, you'd probably see 1 to 2 rq/s unless you become viral. .NET Core can easily handle that and more. [0] https://notesnook.com https://notesnook.com
- TheProTip 3y ago
  Very cool. You may find this OSS .Net project I released recently interesting: https://github.com/stepwisehq/prosemirror-dotnet https://github.com/stepwisehq/prosemirror-dotnet .
- neonsunset 3y ago
  (you can't get more performance out of Go, it is, in a way, higher level language than C#, in which you can write C-like and C++-like code directly)
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marricks 3y ago
Honestly, when I started dev the .net learning materials made me feel like an idiot. It seems like no one teaching it was willing to acknowledge how things were organized might have been stupid. Ergo, any confusion you had was a problem with you not the software. Cryptic errors for basic mistakes and the default option for it, at the time, visual studio's thousand menu's and buttons. "Oh you complete fool, you're using .net version 4.7 which is completely incompatable, go through 5 menus to download it. Hope you have the right version of Microsoft Silverlight!" I had to download like 10 versions of .net by the time I was done. A comparatively large amount of work for a hello world compared to almost any other choice for PHP or Python. And those had tutorials and text based environments were approachable. I definitely had issues with Apache's config hidden god knows where but learning how to search for config files was a skill I found far more useful than rooting around layers of menus while someone told me this was normal and, actually, good. If I had to choose a tech start for a start up MS still wouldn't be my first or second choice. I'm sure it works, but god that first year informed me it wasn't the community I wanted to be in.
Woshiwuja 3y ago
i mean if i had to choose between java and C# im choosing C# everyday, but why would i choose between 2 trashcans?
teleforce 3y ago
Dot net is a series of efforts for the holy grails of write once, run anywhere (WORA) codes. It started with C, then Java and then dot net later WORA iteration, albeit it's already more than 20 years old technology, how time flies. To be fair C is extremely successful in term of popularity (case study Linux), followed by Java (case study Android) and then dot net (case study MAUI), and yet none successfully provides turnkey, seamless and hassle free solution for the WORA codes. This give rise to the joke of "Write Once, Debug Everywhere". It's most likely that dot net is not going to be the last time people try to invent (or re-invent) WORA codes, so prepare yourself for the next big thing in WORA. [1] Write once, run anywhere (WORA): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Write_once,_run_anywhere https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Write_once,_run_anywhere
rjzzleep 3y ago
.NET Core was in some ways inspired by the ALT .NET movement(I think). I'm not entirely sure where it started, but if my own experience (from 2012) is any indication then it was very much related to people coming out of enterprise and government, that had to deal with ASP.NET and WebForms, but didn't want to deal with it, because they had experience with web frameworks that weren't the nightmare ASP.NET and WebForms were. I worked with a few of those in 2012 and people were hopeful about .net core. But the major difference between .net core and typescript besides the historical mental baggage and the way Microsoft typically responds to patches to open source projects is that typescript was building on a massive JavaScript base. And because ECMAScript development was active these two were building on each other. I think C# is a lot nicer than Java but unfortunately with the community mismanagement it's not really a serious contender unless you HAVE to be in that environment(i.e. Microsoft Stack in US healthcare/govt for example)
knallfrosch 3y ago
The naming truly sucks. You search for .NET and you find .NET framework, ASP.NET, .NET Core, .NET Framework, what even is .NET Xamarin MAUI? You look for a solution and find an [AttributeDecorator] that no longer works or is considered bad practise, or is it the new silver bullet - who knows? You better return IHttpActionResult, or do you set the context.Response? Hmm. It's much easier with younger Frameworks like Svelte, NestJS, Flutter or younger languages like TypeScript, GraphQL. You won't be told stuff that's been dead for 20 years.
- nfadili 3y ago
  The naming situation has been the biggest barrier to adoption for me. I’d love a ‘definitive’ guide or set of docs for how to approach the ecosystem in 2023 if anyone has recommendations :)
  - nfadili 3y ago
    Well here is a list of all of the words and their definitions, but the complexity still remains https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/standard/glossary https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/standard/glossary
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ChrisArchitect 3y ago
bad url and [dupe] Earlier discussion over here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37476823 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37476823
phillipcarter 3y ago
When I joined the .NET team in 2015, we were rounding out the first arc of the journey to be truly cross-platform, and June of 2016 released a 1.0. It was an absolute mess of a release, but it actually happened. You can bet your ass that "go after startups" was a part of the strategy - in my first team meeting we literally all read a blog post about how Go was picked over C# at Parse. I'm sure our execution of that strategy could have gone better, but it could have been a lot worse too. Since then, I learned a great deal about how inertia within developer communities works. Every single year I'd speak with a skeptic and they'd have a "reason" not to use .NET that wasn't true. Eventually they'd land on a reason that was true, and in most cases, we were already working on it. We'd even find some past skeptics say publicly how they started paying attention, picked up the tech, and loved it. Fast forward to 2020 and pretty much every possible reason that isn't purely idealogical evaporated because we (hundreds of us) did an immense amount of extremely hard work. But by and large, the perception is still there. The reality is that .NET was a Windows technology for a long time, operating in a space ("the enterprise") that's a wholly separate universe from startups. And people bring what they know into companies; they don't usually try to learn new languages or tech unless it's required for their job. And that's created a feedback cycle where .NET is outside the startup and high tech scene. Yes, there's warts (don't get me started on how MSBuild isn't deterministic, although you likely wouldn't have known that...), but few people run into them. Yes, there's missing packages for some stuff but that gap closes every year. It's not about that. It's about a cultural feedback cycle that .NET is simply not a part of. The bet was that we could build great tech that works in most environments, sprinkle some marketing on it, and people will pick it up. That's largely not happened. Most of modern .NET is still in the same space that Windows .NET was, it's just that it's kept pace with (and sometimes led) the modernization of general tech in that space. That's largely fine because there's millions of developers there.
- tester756 3y ago
  >Every single year I'd speak with a skeptic and they'd have a "reason" not to use .NET that wasn't true. Having to argue with people about how well dotnet runs on Linux after having it deployed on Linux for 6-7 years sucks as hell
naraga 3y ago
i've tried to "escape" .net ecosystem few times already. reason always was curiosity about pther ecosystems / languages. Ruby, Python, JS, Rust. i have returned every single time. from my point of view every other thing i've tried is underdeveloped toy compared to what .net ecosystem gives you. superb languages (c#, f#) toolset, compatibility guarantees. i understand the rebelion point of view and a pay huge respect to those people pushing alternatives forward. thanks to them Microsoft was also able to adapt to latest fanciest standards.
otterpro 3y ago
As a fullstack dev working with c#/.net backend and react frontend, I can say that c# is great, and I wished more projects would use it. <rant> Unfortunately, I agree that Microsoft was too late in realization that it is important to make it easier for developers and that they need to cater to the devs, instead of getting in their ways and making it harder for devs. The visual studio pro is still expensive (it should be FREE! community ed doesn't count) and still not as good as Jetbrain's Rider, which runs circle on VS. In fact, if MS had any sense, they should've bought Jetbrain just for Rider and scrap their bloated/slow visual studio, which only runs on Windows. MS needs to improve their tooling and also make VS for Linux if they want c# to be taken seriously for cross-platform dev. And stop changing the platforms and remove their absolute convoluted naming scheme. Why do we have .NET core which is now .NET 6, .NET framework is now supported and deprecated at the same time, desktop apps were written in WPF, and then UWP? and MAUI, and now is it called WinUI3? I have no idea because I can't keep track of changes anymore. One day it's called .net, who knows in few years it's going to be .azure, or whatever. </rant>
- tester756 3y ago
  >The visual studio pro is still expensive (it should be FREE! community ed doesn't count) and still not as good as Jetbrain's Rider, which runs circle on VS. In Why would you need pro? Also did you use VS with free extensions like Roslynator which significantly increase its refactor capabilities?
xboxnolifes 3y ago
More and more recently I have been seeing C#/.NET show up in job listings that aren't just 10,000+ employee enterprise companies. I think it has been becoming more popular.
- plusmax1 3y ago
  And rightfully so, dotnet nowadays is really a pleasant environment to work with. Fast, good language(s), good libraries, good dev experience and cross platform. Most criticism I see on threads like this is either based on outdated perceptions or on Microsoft hate.
tmitchel2 3y ago
I'm using it for my startup :)
- qingcharles 3y ago
  Me too. I've used it in every startup I've worked at.

48 points by bundie 3y ago

Previously submitted and discussed: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37476823 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37476823

keltex 3y ago

I think the indended link was: https://old.reddit.com/r/dotnet/comments/16fu7o0/why_isnt_dotnet_core_popular_among_startups/ https://old.reddit.com/r/dotnet/comments/16fu7o0/why_isnt_do...

bundie 3y ago
Hacker News messed up the link
- ChrisArchitect 3y ago
  [dupe] anyways https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37476823 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37476823

KingLancelot 3y ago

[dead]

edgyquant 3y ago

Why would you use C# if starting a company/project today? I know C# fans love it, but seriously why not choose a community driven language over one controlled by microsoft?

CharlieDigital 3y ago
What do you see as the issue being "controlled by microsoft"? What risk do you see here?
- AlecSchueler 3y ago
  There was a good discussion just yesterday, "Why did Visual Basic die?" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37470318 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37470318 That might be a place to start looking. It basically comes down to:b they could take development in any direction and the community of users is powerless.
  - jodrellblank 3y ago
    But why can't you fork it and take it in the direction you want? The situation is literally no different from Python or Node or Ruby, the people running the most popular distribution could take it in a direction you don't like and the power you have (or the only option you have) is forking.
    - AlecSchueler 3y ago
      The development for a language like python happens entirely in public though, and is driven by consensus.
      - jodrellblank 3y ago
        https://github.com/dotnet/csharplang https://github.com/dotnet/csharplang - "The official repo for the design of the C# programming language" that's in public.
        AlecSchueler 3y ago
        Infront of the public, yes, but it says you need to be invited by someone from their team to participate yourself, compare that with the python process. There's a distinction to be made between doing something in public and something being done by the public.
  - HelloNurse 3y ago
    For .Net, there's an established pattern of careless deprecation that produced enough frameworks to date codebases like tree rings: - this year's correct way to access your database is... - this year's correct way to serve dynamic web pages is... - this year's correct way to make a Windows GUI is...
VHRanger 3y ago
I wouldn't use it personally because I use other languages, but C# is perfectly fine? It's basically Java without most of the bad parts. It's a very well designed language that fits most niches (fast, compiled, familiar syntax, feature rich, adopts recent PL concepts, etc.)
- sanderjd 3y ago
  Yeah every time I use C# a bit, I just have to laugh a little bit in comparison with java (which I've used a lot more); it reminds me of nothing so much as reading a first draft, and then reading a final version of the same thing after it's been worked over by a good editor.
- jmaker 3y ago
  To me it’s not about the language, I can anytime switch to Kotlin or Scala, even Clojure but I don’t do LISP. To me it’s mostly about the developer experience, build tools and the simplicity in the ops. In JVM there’s so many moving pieces and knobs to control, it’s so brittle. I can live with the trap field in Java the language that’s justified by backwards compatibility. But I prefer to let juniors steer away from Java to Kotlin so they avoid all those traps. I love Java and the JVM for the versatility and the variation. But Java steals too much productive time and eats up too much RAM. And every new praised feature comes with many caveats because the OpenJDK folks want to keep it backwards compatible and carry on all that dangerous garbage resulting from the many bad design decision made in the past. Virtual threads come with many caveats. Pattern matching too. The Panama FFI has been underwhelming. The value types proposal is kinda weird. GraalVM is great on paper but have you met someone satisfied with it in production? It’s nice you can, in principle, embed an R, JS, Python, Ruby and Java runtime on it in the same app, but does it actually work in production? It’s all praised to the infinity but it just doesn’t work right in production. And what’s dangerous - the caveats are not advertised at all, you really need to be very cautious and follow all the relevant Oracle talks and discussions here and on Reddit just to not endanger your software. Do you really believe that an average Java developer can cope with all that sheer complexity? For example, pron might tell you virtual threads are fine but do you have the budget to even invite him on your team? Yes, obviously, you don’t have to be one of the developers of the Virtual Threads to use them appropriately, and they gave their best to make the APIs as user friendly as they could, which few really appreciate. My point is that it’s only the tip of the iceberg that many people talk about when they discuss languages. This may come as an unpopular opinion but that’s just my experience. So, no, C# is not “basically Java”—it began as such and perhaps a decade ago that would be a good assessment. But today, C# is a robust language in its own right. You can also choose F# or VB if you like, they all run on the same CLR, like the JVM languages. And .NET is a full-fledged robust and comprehensive framework. There’s much less variability in the correctness and cohesion of the implementations across the .NET ecosystem—already because there’s much fewer moving parts and knobs to control. And .NET apps use much less memory for the same throughput and latency than JVM apps. In addition, as for DX, EF Core is much more efficient and straightforward than Hibernate and Spring Data JPA, and so on. It just works.
mdgrech23 3y ago
I still despise Microsoft but I'm old although I'm old but I think most people on here too. They do make some good development products VSCode and Github in particular but I'd still rather avoid them as much as possible.
- philipov 3y ago
  Saying Microsoft "makes" GitHub is quite a stretch. Microsoft owns GitHub. They did not make it. https://i.kym-cdn.com/photos/images/newsfeed/001/079/173/ed2.png https://i.kym-cdn.com/photos/images/newsfeed/001/079/173/ed2...
ubermonkey 3y ago
If you're building Windows software, then you might find it easier to use the Windows-native stack. If you're not, then I'm not sure what the appeal would be. I work for a company in the former space. We have no intention of supporting nonWindows clients or nonWindows servers or even nonSQLServer DBs. It's not worth doing from a commercial perspective in our particular market. Consequently, it's C# and .NET.
- paddim8 3y ago
  .NET has great crossplatform support anyway
- CharlieDigital 3y ago
  I do all of my .NET work on a Mac and deploy to Linux -- both x64 and Arm64 -- on the daily.
  - ubermonkey 3y ago
    Wow, really? That's wild to me.
    - jmaker 3y ago
      Yeah, I’ve run the same dev setup since the M1 came out. Totally stable and robust. Nothing wild at all. Every .NET dev who’s on an ARM Mac today is most likely doing the same. If you like you can run Windows ARM in a VM on the same Mac if you want to run native WinUI, WPF, etc. GUI or anything Win32 specific.
    - CharlieDigital 3y ago
      There are some tradeoffs, but some really key benefits which make it worth it. Tradeoffs: - You'll have to use Rider if you want a full IDE - Or get used to VS Code and know its gaps - Some workloads aren't as well supported in VSC (e.g. MAUI, desktop apps); as long as you don't need these, VSC is fine - I know at least the CosmosDB emulator straight up does not work in ARM, even with the x64 emulation on the Docker image. Has been that way since M1 released. - Occasionally, you'll run into issues where there are dependencies on x64 binaries like with Google OR-Tools which has a .NET wrapper around a C++ library. - Have to get used to configuring cross-platform builds for .NET and Docker (not hard) since you'll often still be running in x64 environments in upstream cloud deploy targets. - Terrible multi-monitor support; you'll need a $250+ DisplayLink capable dock for more than 2 screens. - And the text doesn't render quite as crisp as Windows; might be that it would if I were using Apple monitors, but the same monitors are notably more crisp with Windows 11. Benefits: - PHENOMENAL battery life; for this alone, it was worth the switch. It's insane how good the battery life is for the performance. I've previously used top-of-the-line Dell Precision mobile workstations and the performance for the battery life on ARM64 is just unmatched. I can run Postgres (in Docker), a handful of Docker images, VS Code, and code on a cross-country flight - The form factor is phenomenal. The same size as a Microsoft Surface 13.5" laptop but has 3 USB-C ports and an HDMI port. Of course, the phenomenal performance and battery life listed above - The laptop is absolutely silent; never hear the fan kick on. I can be compiling away, running a Node-powered front-end dev runtime, a .NET web API, Docker containers -- never hear a damn thing. Coding in complete silence is kind of crazy. - Stays relatively cool and never reaches the same temps as a Windows Intel laptop Some lessons learned: - It takes a while to remap your brain for KB shortcuts; get Karabiner to save your sanity - Download iTerm; it's like Windows Terminal - If you switch to VSC, you need to commit to it and get used to the CLI
hardware2win 3y ago
Because ecosystem is less fragmented which makes day to day job pleasant C# has best tooling on the market, by far. Btw. C# has huge oss community
- barumrho 3y ago
  One could argue that fragmentation is a sign of more active development and a cause for excitement. Of course, it comes with less stability/maturity, but it means that everyone is empowered to do their own thing. Huge cultural difference.
  - hardware2win 3y ago
    Both sides have pros and cons But for some reasons ppl that argue for fragmentation under umbrella of innovation never talk about sane experience, especially for newbies
  - hahn-kev 3y ago
    Yeah because the fragmentation of the JS ecosystem is such a great feature
    - hardware2win 3y ago
      Especially in the world of supply chain attacks
easton 3y ago
TypeScript is also controlled by MS and that has tons of community support. Sure, if things got evil someone would fork/reimplement, but right now Microsoft decides how the language goes for the most part. And for writing C# on the server, the major benefit is that Microsoft has a batteries included web framework that’s very battle tested. There’s at least one good first party answer for every problem (auth, database connections, caching, etc) which is very nice as compared to finding 30 npm packages to try to put stuff together. And C# is a pretty nice type-safe language that’s as fast if not faster than Java. As for the front-end scene? Yuck. That’s a big ol mess in .NET right now.
- marcosdumay 3y ago
  But there is a very compelling reason to use TypeScript. There isn't one for C#. (And, oh man, that batteries included battle tested framework is a stinky pile of trash. The language itself is ok, but the framework uses every misguided trend somebody at MS thought as cool, has no documentation of them, and implements half of them in some way that only that person thought about. There is a passable "web framework" inside it, but you have to ignore the MS recommendations and know what tons of pieces to discard, also, it's not very batteries included, because the batteries are almost all poisonous.)
  - jmaker 3y ago
    This is kinda totally off. You could say that about Spring and Pivotal/Tanzu/VMware or even Quarkus and Red Hat, or just IBM. In my experience though those words apply best to much of the Python and Rust landscape. You could say much more about the Node landscape. But .NET and ASP? Really? Could you substantiate?
  - andomggazzz662 3y ago
    I find the opposite to be the case in all honesty. I've never used C# or dotnet core but I know from word of mouth that it is a relatively well put together framework of tools for doing a lot of the things organizations with a lot of backend services to write might need. Many of those orgs are already very locked in with Microsoft, so the greater support by the open source community that comes with typescript is mostly irrelevant. Whatever the officially supported version of something is is what you will be required to use, and the typescript ecosystem provides very little if you want some big company to declare one particular thing to be the blessed solution.
skinnyarms 3y ago
Why not? It's a great mix of productivity and power and the Microsoft/Azure ecosystem works really well together. You can go with dynamic languages if you're flying fast and loose, or native languages like Go/Rust if you are worried about performance but you miss out on the "enterprise" integrations of something like Java or .Net. Speaking of Java, it's great too but the ecosystem is a jungle. It's more flexible, but that flexibility has a cost too and you'll spend a lot of time frustrated trying to figure out the right combination of configs in xml, toml, yaml, json, env, properties, etc files.
bob1029 3y ago
We like the fact that it's pay to play and controlled by one big org. There is a strong financial incentive to keep current customers locked-in and happy. This aligns well with our business model which involves b2b software contracts that last 5+ years. They don't always get this right but if you are careful you can get a codebase to survive 10-15 years under Microsoft without too much suffering. If you latch on to every shiny new thing they release (cough MAUI cough), then you will find yourself despising Microsoft. Stick to the basics and a vendor like Microsoft can take you to the moon with zero drama.
antiloper 3y ago
Your mileage may vary but my opinion: Because its controlled by Microsoft. ASP.NET Core brings everything necessary to develop a web application, from an ORM, to a web server, to a router, to an HTML templating language, to a client-side SPA framework. All components are designed to work together and have high quality documentation. That makes it easier to get started than say Python where you have to depend on multiple third party libraries with different support cycles, API styles, or even async programming models (e.g. gevent vs async/await in Python). And you can still swap components out if needed. Not saying Rust or Python etc. are bad for writing startup software. Given the ecosystems I personally find it faster to get started with .NET because of the reasons above.
Const-me 3y ago
I don’t care who controls what if the technology in question is technically good, and it comes with a good enough license. Here’s two examples. For embedded Linux, .NET runtime delivers memory safety for high-level pieces, great support for networking and multithreading, combined with simple unmanaged interop for low-level pieces. The lower-level parts of the software I made were in C++ to consume OS APIs not exposed to C# like drm/kms/egl, also to implement a few performance-critical functions in C++ with NEON SIMD. For a web service running on Linux: the same binary runs on my development amd64 Windows and the target aarch64 Linux which makes it easy to develop and test stuff. Asp.net framework is first party, stable, and mature. The runtime is relatively small and is trivial to deploy. That project didn’t use C++ at all; the complete server is implemented in memory-safe managed code, good for security.
elorant 3y ago
Because MS provides superb documentation and backwards compatibility. Everything you write now will still compile after 20 years.

barumrho 3y ago

Isn't it because it was tied to Windows? My impression still is that the ecosystem is not as well supported outside of Windows. Similar problem with Swift even though it started out as an open source project. The ties to Apple OSes are hard to break and ignore.

easton 3y ago
Linux support is pretty good now. We only run it on Linux at work for web apps, works just as well as Node or whatever.
- barumrho 3y ago
  How about things like IDE and related development tools? Same level of support on Linux?
  - ImPleadThe5th 3y ago
    Rider (from JetBrains) is basically the go to IDE for most .net/c# devs I've met professionally. VisualStudio has come a long way but Rider is just chefs kiss. And it is available on all platforms. It used to use IIS express to run its applications locally (it has meh cross platform support) now it by default uses docker when bootstrapping a new application. I've only ever developed for it on windows and very minimally on Linux, but I did not feel that the experience was worse on Linux.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
ImPleadThe5th 3y ago
Unfortunately the perception remains, but its been platform agnostic since like 2016. I think it deserves some of the hate it gets for its previous state, but it is really a pleasure to work with these days. My current job is a kotlin shop and I miss .net/c# a lot.
- 3y ago

nsonha 3y ago

Do people actually like C#? It seems like a really bloated language with a ton of features.

qingcharles 3y ago
Yes, it's an excellent development language, IMO. I honestly preferred VB.NET, but I'll settle for C#. It has great community support, great libraries too. This is coming from someone who started out writing x86 assembler and has been coding on almost every platform known to man for the last 40 years.
naasking 3y ago
Features are not bloat if they address real issues.
yonaguska 3y ago
I actually enjoy it. And this is coming from someone that spent a lot of time in C, assembler, lisp, Scala, Java, and so on....C# is much nicer than it used to be, and gets out of the way. Tooling is so much better than it was just 5 years ago. I'm using rider on an m2 with no issues. Of course it's not free- regular vs2022 won't even open on a mac. Most of the things I don't like about C# mostly have to do with the community and the average C# developer. Even the documentation, which used to just suck, is getting better.
- donny2018 3y ago
  >I'm using rider on an m2 with no issues. Of course it's not free I just don't understand the "Rider is not free" thing. Just come on now, guys. It's like $15 a month, a price of 1 good meal pretty much anywhere in the world. In my 3rd world country, even students could afford it. If you earn money with code, it should be no brainer. If you are a someone who is just learning and hacking around, or just want everything to be free forever, then VS Code with C# DevKit is more than adequate, you can even do professional work with it. I'm saying this assuming you are on Mac/Linux. On Windows, the powerful (and free) VS Community Edition will get you covered, unless your revenue exceeds 1M, in which case you probably can afford the VS Professional license.

INTPenis 3y ago

As a lifetime Linux user, I think it's obvious. A startup is about getting a product out to market as soon as possible, and hopefully as cheaply as possible, which can best be done with open and freely available tools. When I'm in the zone, my creativity is flowing, the last thing I need is to register on some website, or to purchase a license.

hardware2win 3y ago
How is this even related to dotnet? All you need to type is some apt get dotn... and you can go
- INTPenis 3y ago
  Then I guess Microsoft have a long way to come in destroying old stigmas about their software and ecosystem. I was actually devops for a .net project at my $dayjob, and I noticed the nuget repositories we setup in Gitlab for the developers. So I could tell that a lot of my preconceptions about .net are probably wrong. But I'd still prefer any other language like Python, Rust, Golang, Nodejs just because I'm afraid of running into some enterprise wall in their historic walled garden. It's so damn frustrating to run into tooling issues, and when they stem from ruthless capitalism it seems even more frustrating than simple package management issues with npm for example. At least I can always check the source code. ;)
  - hardware2win 3y ago
    >It's so damn frustrating to run into tooling issues, and when they stem from ruthless capitalism it seems even more frustrating than simple package management issues with npm for example. At least I can always check the source code. ;) https://source.dot.net https://source.dot.net or github >than simple package management issues with npm Unlike js, Microsoft has shitton of stuff in std, so no need for 3rd :)
- fennecfired 3y ago
  You edited your comment, but the comparison of Microsoft to Oracle is pretty fitting. They're both the worst of the worst.

pluto_modadic 3y ago

oh lord. Not just a meme language as discussed, but the language and framework design decisions alone are bad enough. add onto that the business heads who think they should use C# for their startup also bring legacy enterprise ideas with them that won't work...

skwirl 3y ago
C# is one of the best designed languages that I've had the pleasure to use.
- Woshiwuja 3y ago
  Except it's a java copy. And java sucks
  - skwirl 3y ago
    Have you ever actually written software professionally? I get strong teenage vibes from your comment history.
    - nsonha 3y ago
      A big part of why java sucks is that you get failed software engineers to teach them at universities, and teenages took their crappy code and think that's representative of java or programming as a whole even.
      - Woshiwuja 3y ago
        I swear i heard the lecture about class at least 10 times. Also most of interaction i had with java was working with legacy software. Not great.
      - Woshiwuja 3y ago
        Java server pages is evil.

glutamate 3y ago

My 2¢: if they really wanted to light up adoption, release a TypeScript compiler. I don't mean to JavaScript but TS to CLR. C# is already so close to TypeScript. And the TS ecosystem and mindshare is huge

taxman22 3y ago

You should use the best tool for the job, and if that's dotnet go for it. That said, it would be difficult to hire strong engineers, across all experience levels. Your team would probably skew older and have outdated engineering practices.

fennecfired 3y ago
You should use the best tool for the job, but also consider the ramifications of supporting monopolies/cronyism and exclude those options.

olavgg 3y ago

I recently launched a startup, we use Java, some Python and even a little bit of Rust. For web we also use plain Javascript. We will most likely add some GoLang and C/C++ for specific problems we need to solve in the future. But using C# .Net? It's completely irrelevant, it adds absolutely nothing. The performance is similar to Java. The syntax is similar to Java. But the eco-system is one of the smallest of all the big programming languages. And most of the documentation/blog posts about C# is heavily Windows focused, and we run only on Linux. The only reason I think of why I should use C# is when we need a Windows-based desktop application. But I think Java+JavaFX will be just as good and will also work great on MacOS and Linux desktop.

hahn-kev 3y ago
I can't tell if this is serious that you're a startup using 3 languages with plans to use 2 more. I'm not saying that those might be the best tool for the job, but the complexity to manage that whole build chain sounds crazy overkill complicated for what amounts to premature optimization using all those languages
- jmaker 3y ago
  While I agree with you that such complexity is expensive to manage, I think it primarily depends on the expertise of your team. If you can foresee the need for Rust, say, and your team knows how to manage its risks, and it is financially viable to maintain so many stacks, I think it’s fine. But if the team just wants to put a badge on their chest for using Rust, that’s a different story. I’ve been always striving to reduce the complexity and pick only one framework. Sometimes it’s hard and such decisions must be made. On a larger project I integrated and developed Go, Rust, and Java services, tightly knit to their context bounds. It was alright and seemed to make sense but the strain was immense. People tend to underappreciate how much time it costs to do the context switch in your head when you change across different stacks, and how much lost opportunity it incurs for not spending that time to dice deeper in only one tech stack.
- olavgg 3y ago
  I can explain why. Java is great for web, api's and most things. But Java is not really that great for doing data science. Python is great for data science, the Python community has put a great effort making Python "The place to be for Data Science" and Rust helps us speed up heavy tasks that are too slow with Python. It is not really crazy complicated, it's simple stuff that is very well documented. We try choose the right tool for the job, and we don't care about which language we use. If we tried to do everything in Java, we would spent at least 2x more time on building our software.

shrubble 3y ago

Their idea of a long term release is 3 years, for one, which can cause maintainability headaches. Second, portability across Unix platforms is low - the current release doesn't even run on FreeBSD .

thecodrr 3y ago

I don't think that's true. We have been using ASP .NET Core + SignalR for everything in Notesnook[0]. It has great performance, libraries for everything out there, very good ergonomics, and a mature ecosystem. I know you can probably get more performance out of Rust or Go but I don't think rq/s benchmarks really hold up in reality. If you are running a startup, you'd probably see 1 to 2 rq/s unless you become viral. .NET Core can easily handle that and more. [0] https://notesnook.com https://notesnook.com

TheProTip 3y ago
Very cool. You may find this OSS .Net project I released recently interesting: https://github.com/stepwisehq/prosemirror-dotnet https://github.com/stepwisehq/prosemirror-dotnet .
neonsunset 3y ago
(you can't get more performance out of Go, it is, in a way, higher level language than C#, in which you can write C-like and C++-like code directly)

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

marricks 3y ago

Honestly, when I started dev the .net learning materials made me feel like an idiot. It seems like no one teaching it was willing to acknowledge how things were organized might have been stupid. Ergo, any confusion you had was a problem with you not the software. Cryptic errors for basic mistakes and the default option for it, at the time, visual studio's thousand menu's and buttons. "Oh you complete fool, you're using .net version 4.7 which is completely incompatable, go through 5 menus to download it. Hope you have the right version of Microsoft Silverlight!" I had to download like 10 versions of .net by the time I was done. A comparatively large amount of work for a hello world compared to almost any other choice for PHP or Python. And those had tutorials and text based environments were approachable. I definitely had issues with Apache's config hidden god knows where but learning how to search for config files was a skill I found far more useful than rooting around layers of menus while someone told me this was normal and, actually, good. If I had to choose a tech start for a start up MS still wouldn't be my first or second choice. I'm sure it works, but god that first year informed me it wasn't the community I wanted to be in.

Woshiwuja 3y ago

i mean if i had to choose between java and C# im choosing C# everyday, but why would i choose between 2 trashcans?

teleforce 3y ago

Dot net is a series of efforts for the holy grails of write once, run anywhere (WORA) codes. It started with C, then Java and then dot net later WORA iteration, albeit it's already more than 20 years old technology, how time flies. To be fair C is extremely successful in term of popularity (case study Linux), followed by Java (case study Android) and then dot net (case study MAUI), and yet none successfully provides turnkey, seamless and hassle free solution for the WORA codes. This give rise to the joke of "Write Once, Debug Everywhere". It's most likely that dot net is not going to be the last time people try to invent (or re-invent) WORA codes, so prepare yourself for the next big thing in WORA. [1] Write once, run anywhere (WORA): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Write_once,_run_anywhere https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Write_once,_run_anywhere

rjzzleep 3y ago

.NET Core was in some ways inspired by the ALT .NET movement(I think). I'm not entirely sure where it started, but if my own experience (from 2012) is any indication then it was very much related to people coming out of enterprise and government, that had to deal with ASP.NET and WebForms, but didn't want to deal with it, because they had experience with web frameworks that weren't the nightmare ASP.NET and WebForms were. I worked with a few of those in 2012 and people were hopeful about .net core. But the major difference between .net core and typescript besides the historical mental baggage and the way Microsoft typically responds to patches to open source projects is that typescript was building on a massive JavaScript base. And because ECMAScript development was active these two were building on each other. I think C# is a lot nicer than Java but unfortunately with the community mismanagement it's not really a serious contender unless you HAVE to be in that environment(i.e. Microsoft Stack in US healthcare/govt for example)

knallfrosch 3y ago

The naming truly sucks. You search for .NET and you find .NET framework, ASP.NET, .NET Core, .NET Framework, what even is .NET Xamarin MAUI? You look for a solution and find an [AttributeDecorator] that no longer works or is considered bad practise, or is it the new silver bullet - who knows? You better return IHttpActionResult, or do you set the context.Response? Hmm. It's much easier with younger Frameworks like Svelte, NestJS, Flutter or younger languages like TypeScript, GraphQL. You won't be told stuff that's been dead for 20 years.

nfadili 3y ago
The naming situation has been the biggest barrier to adoption for me. I’d love a ‘definitive’ guide or set of docs for how to approach the ecosystem in 2023 if anyone has recommendations :)
- nfadili 3y ago
  Well here is a list of all of the words and their definitions, but the complexity still remains https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/standard/glossary https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/standard/glossary

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

ChrisArchitect 3y ago

bad url and [dupe] Earlier discussion over here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37476823 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37476823

phillipcarter 3y ago

When I joined the .NET team in 2015, we were rounding out the first arc of the journey to be truly cross-platform, and June of 2016 released a 1.0. It was an absolute mess of a release, but it actually happened. You can bet your ass that "go after startups" was a part of the strategy - in my first team meeting we literally all read a blog post about how Go was picked over C# at Parse. I'm sure our execution of that strategy could have gone better, but it could have been a lot worse too. Since then, I learned a great deal about how inertia within developer communities works. Every single year I'd speak with a skeptic and they'd have a "reason" not to use .NET that wasn't true. Eventually they'd land on a reason that was true, and in most cases, we were already working on it. We'd even find some past skeptics say publicly how they started paying attention, picked up the tech, and loved it. Fast forward to 2020 and pretty much every possible reason that isn't purely idealogical evaporated because we (hundreds of us) did an immense amount of extremely hard work. But by and large, the perception is still there. The reality is that .NET was a Windows technology for a long time, operating in a space ("the enterprise") that's a wholly separate universe from startups. And people bring what they know into companies; they don't usually try to learn new languages or tech unless it's required for their job. And that's created a feedback cycle where .NET is outside the startup and high tech scene. Yes, there's warts (don't get me started on how MSBuild isn't deterministic, although you likely wouldn't have known that...), but few people run into them. Yes, there's missing packages for some stuff but that gap closes every year. It's not about that. It's about a cultural feedback cycle that .NET is simply not a part of. The bet was that we could build great tech that works in most environments, sprinkle some marketing on it, and people will pick it up. That's largely not happened. Most of modern .NET is still in the same space that Windows .NET was, it's just that it's kept pace with (and sometimes led) the modernization of general tech in that space. That's largely fine because there's millions of developers there.

tester756 3y ago
>Every single year I'd speak with a skeptic and they'd have a "reason" not to use .NET that wasn't true. Having to argue with people about how well dotnet runs on Linux after having it deployed on Linux for 6-7 years sucks as hell

naraga 3y ago

i've tried to "escape" .net ecosystem few times already. reason always was curiosity about pther ecosystems / languages. Ruby, Python, JS, Rust. i have returned every single time. from my point of view every other thing i've tried is underdeveloped toy compared to what .net ecosystem gives you. superb languages (c#, f#) toolset, compatibility guarantees. i understand the rebelion point of view and a pay huge respect to those people pushing alternatives forward. thanks to them Microsoft was also able to adapt to latest fanciest standards.

otterpro 3y ago

As a fullstack dev working with c#/.net backend and react frontend, I can say that c# is great, and I wished more projects would use it. <rant> Unfortunately, I agree that Microsoft was too late in realization that it is important to make it easier for developers and that they need to cater to the devs, instead of getting in their ways and making it harder for devs. The visual studio pro is still expensive (it should be FREE! community ed doesn't count) and still not as good as Jetbrain's Rider, which runs circle on VS. In fact, if MS had any sense, they should've bought Jetbrain just for Rider and scrap their bloated/slow visual studio, which only runs on Windows. MS needs to improve their tooling and also make VS for Linux if they want c# to be taken seriously for cross-platform dev. And stop changing the platforms and remove their absolute convoluted naming scheme. Why do we have .NET core which is now .NET 6, .NET framework is now supported and deprecated at the same time, desktop apps were written in WPF, and then UWP? and MAUI, and now is it called WinUI3? I have no idea because I can't keep track of changes anymore. One day it's called .net, who knows in few years it's going to be .azure, or whatever. </rant>

tester756 3y ago
>The visual studio pro is still expensive (it should be FREE! community ed doesn't count) and still not as good as Jetbrain's Rider, which runs circle on VS. In Why would you need pro? Also did you use VS with free extensions like Roslynator which significantly increase its refactor capabilities?

xboxnolifes 3y ago

More and more recently I have been seeing C#/.NET show up in job listings that aren't just 10,000+ employee enterprise companies. I think it has been becoming more popular.

plusmax1 3y ago
And rightfully so, dotnet nowadays is really a pleasant environment to work with. Fast, good language(s), good libraries, good dev experience and cross platform. Most criticism I see on threads like this is either based on outdated perceptions or on Microsoft hate.

tmitchel2 3y ago

I'm using it for my startup :)

qingcharles 3y ago
Me too. I've used it in every startup I've worked at.