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Sad this gets to front page while a blog post which documents that .NET 8 has 200 A4 pages worth of performance improvements gets absolutely ignored. C# keeps

Sad this gets to front page while a blog post which documents that .NET 8 has 200 A4 pages worth of performance improvements gets absolutely ignored. C# keeps being the language people are looking for but don't know about.

romanovcode 3y ago
> C# keeps being the language people are looking for but don't know about. Every time I point out about C# most programmers are saying about evil Microsoft and being locked in the ecosystem. Most programmers I've met do not even know that .NET Core is MIT open-source and runs on any device. I really wish C# would be more widely used because it is amazing, and for sure 10 times better then Java.
mu53 3y ago
Its a good language, but the corporate sponsor and community is suspect. Microsoft has a long history of user hostile actions. The types of companies that use C# often treat SWE as second class. Learning and using C# limits career options to low salary, high stress jobs.
- neonsunset 3y ago
  I'm going to vouch for this comment but not because it is correct but rather it presents good opportunity to address the concern. C# and .NET are most heavily invested in by Microsoft which owns and steers its development, that is true. It is also true that JVM world sees investment from multiple MSFT-sized corporations. And yet, despite the above, it keeps moving forward and outperforming Java on user experience, performance and features despite being worked on by much smaller teams. I think it stands on its own as a measure of a well-made technology. In addition, you can look at source code and contribute yourself, 90% of what makes .NET run is below. Almost all development happens in the open: https://github.com/dotnet/runtime https://github.com/dotnet/installer https://github.com/dotnet/roslyn https://github.com/dotnet/aspnetcore Could Microsoft do a better job at making it even more community-facing and attempting to make the .NET foundation as a sole owner and steering committee of the language itself? Sure. But it's not that bad either today. Quick reminder - Oracle is not exactly a saint, perhaps even worse (MSFT has never gotten into any litigation even remotely related to .NET or C#). As for career opportunities, as other commenters would note, this is highly specific to a region and does not translate globally. Again, we are discussing the "how good the language/platform is" first and foremost. I don't see startups adopting Go because of the market or trusting Google not to rug pull them...so perhaps we can do a better job so the next language of choice they pick is C#, which has much higher ROI in the hands of the good developers (for example, it can be very easy to adopt as a second language if you are well versed in Rust).
  - catlover76 3y ago
    I don't have as much experience or knowledge as others in this thread, but just taking the opportunity to chime in that C# is a great language, and pretty pleasant to work with. And it was a language to which I was introduced as a 24 year old at a venture-backed startup, not at like Boeing or the company Dilbert works at or something. It has features like LINQ. It has routinely had a lot of good updates, new features always coming out, increases in performance, etc. The primary thing lacking has been good support for developing and deploying on Linux, and a couple other devops-related things. It's a shame to see that holding it back, but at least MSFT actually opened up Linux support at all (nobody thought they would).
  - bbkane 3y ago
    See https://isdotnetopen.com/ https://isdotnetopen.com/ for why people think .NET has openness issues
- Bognar 3y ago
  Microsoft uses C# internally and has a vested interest in making it better for all of its own developers, as well as making it good to increase industry adoption so it has a larger pool of skilled developers to hire from. Your arguments about who backs the language don't hold water.
  - iopq 3y ago
    Does it have a vested interest to make everything work cross-platform?
    - neonsunset 3y ago
      Well, Linux has won the cloud meaning it is and will be a primary target for .NET. I'm not sure what vested interest MSFT had in some of the changes introduced for iOS in .NET 8, but now it can be targeted with NativeAOT too, so there is clear investment and dev effort both from community contributors and MSFT employees to support various platforms. Somewhat arbitrary example, there is also a project to support RISC-V (https://github.com/dotnet/runtime/issues/84834 https://github.com/dotnet/runtime/issues/84834).
    - Bognar 3y ago
      For both reasons mentioned above, yes. Even internally, many teams in Microsoft are shipping containers on Linux for prod services. Azure is also the big moneymaker, so these days they want all their technologies to have Linux support since that's the dominant cloud OS.
paradite 3y ago
We live in bubbles. In my limited 6 years of professional experience as a software engineer, I have never met a single person who writes C# or .NET.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
paulddraper 3y ago
It's because C# only "recently" became cross platform in a reasonable way. Hard to overstate the mindshare that it lost for that
- 5e92cb50239222b 3y ago
  And it's still not as cross-platform as Java is, or pretty much all other tech stacks. FreeBSD and commercial UNIXen are not supported at all. If you prefer to develop on macOS or Linux (hi there), you don't get access to many Windows-only tools (mostly for debugging and performance measurement). Microsoft only cares about other operating systems to inasmuch as you can host the resulting application there, but really expects you to develop on Windows. Which makes sense... for them.
  - neonsunset 3y ago
    For Linux and macOS you can use Rider and CLI tooling (as expected for most other langs), VS Code is up there but obviously does not come with profiling or advanced debugging tools. The bias does exist but it's going away, especially that now a lot of developers are moving over to M-series macs.
devjab 3y ago
It’s because C# is only really nice on the surface. As soon as you actually do something with it that takes it beyond its cozy CRUD, it becomes such a nuisance to work with. We have an ODATA client that we build our selves to use in our React frontend. Now, this would obviously not have been something we also used on the backend if we knew what we know now, but it’s the perfect example to illustrate my decades of experience with C#. We had the client because we use a lot of Office365 and BC36 APIs and they are ODATA, and since we had the client we figured we might as well use ODATA on our internal APIs. Which was all well and good until we tried mixing EntityFramework, ASP versioning and ODATA together. These are all Microsoft packages mind you, and they just don’t work together. They each use the Model builder magic that C# comes with, but they each use it differently enough that things become a nightmare. Which basically sums up why C# has been a terrible language for its entire existence. If you never get to those breaking points, then C# is fine. But when you use it for what you’d assume it was intended for, well… At least the ODATA experience sort of triggered my C# PTSD from back when I wrote an admin system to maintain all the thousands of school printers and computers in a municipality, which was hefty Active Directy work and an absolute nightmare to the point where I literally had to either extend or rewrite half the Microsoft packages because they either weren’t finished or outright terrible (again likely because they weren’t finished). Similar to how the ODATA, ASP versioning and EntiryFramework packages aren’t really finished right now. I mean, I can look at the road map for EF and see some of our issues as planned fixes on who knows when. Anyway, since those days more than a decade ago, it’s become obvious that if you want to do anything AD related then you need to use PowerShell and not C#, really, C# doesn’t even run in Azure runbooks and Python does so it’s obvious that Microsoft themselves don’t really use a whole lot of C# for that part of IT operations internally. And I think it’s frankly the same with a lot of things. The ODATA package seems to fall in that same “not used by Microsoft” box. Because it appears to be some sort of “fork” that’s mostly maintained by a single employee in China. So yes, if you just use regular ASP and EF without versioning or ODATA to do very standard CRUD monolith APIs it’s a language that’s both fast and productive. Sure you’ll still need to do all sorts of silly things with your Azure DevOps pipelines to get EF migrations for Microsoft’s own SQL server to work, but hey, you can. But if you’re actually going to be doing things that takes it beyond it’s “basics” then no, C# is really not the language people are looking for but don’t know about. I’m also partly in the “Java is sort of 10 years late with 21” club, but it’s not like anyone has switched away from Java in those 10 years, and really, it’s not like it was a fun experience to go through the .Net -> .Net Core -> .Net, .Net Standard and .Net Core -> .Net years, so maybe Java did it right?
kaba0 3y ago
Since it is a Java thread, I’m gonna mention that ecosystem-wise, the JVM is just much much bigger and of higher quality - you very often see copied JVM packages in C# with much less features, less stability, and often even being paid. With that said, it is a cool language and platform, that is indeed underhyped.
- olavgg 3y ago
  This 100x, C# and Java are also very similar programming languages. C# may be a better language, but the difference is minimal. Most C# developers claiming that C# is a better language often don't know Java. I remember one C# guy telling me that Java didn't have closures before Java 8, which was not quite true. Java developers had access to Groovy which had closures. Groovy may be another programming language, but it has always had 99% Java syntax compatibility and they both compile to the same byte code and work seamlessy together. Groovy 4 also has LINQ if you like that. And using Groovy is no harder than including it as a dependency in Gradle/Maven. Java eco system is so vast, and of top notch quality, with excellent documentation available for free. It enables businesses to move faster, at a pace most other languages cannot offer. It's not perfect, especially I find data sciene libraries lacking in Java compared to what the Python eco system offers. But depending on the task I try to choose the right tool for the job, not the same language for every job.
  - raziel2p 3y ago
    Groovy is... not Java.
    - olavgg 3y ago
      I think it is, just as Gradle is Java. Groovy is a superset of Java, and makes some parts of Java development better. I for example write many tests with Groovy or implement DSLs for my clients with Groovy.
mrkeen 3y ago
I've written in C#. It's Java. If they're not the same language to you, you need to learn more languages.
equasar 3y ago
Second this. But here in hacker news, C# is hated for no reason, just the old Microsoft mantra and NET Framework
switch007 3y ago
Are you feigning ignorance about why people don’t like Microsoft? We all know C# exists
ahoka 3y ago
Both are horrible languages and while Java libraries are abundant, most are horribly over-engineered, archaic stuff from the 2000s, where everything was about forcing OOP on every problem. Log4j executed code from an ldap server. Insane.

romanovcode 3y ago

> C# keeps being the language people are looking for but don't know about. Every time I point out about C# most programmers are saying about evil Microsoft and being locked in the ecosystem. Most programmers I've met do not even know that .NET Core is MIT open-source and runs on any device. I really wish C# would be more widely used because it is amazing, and for sure 10 times better then Java.

mu53 3y ago

Its a good language, but the corporate sponsor and community is suspect. Microsoft has a long history of user hostile actions. The types of companies that use C# often treat SWE as second class. Learning and using C# limits career options to low salary, high stress jobs.

neonsunset 3y ago
I'm going to vouch for this comment but not because it is correct but rather it presents good opportunity to address the concern. C# and .NET are most heavily invested in by Microsoft which owns and steers its development, that is true. It is also true that JVM world sees investment from multiple MSFT-sized corporations. And yet, despite the above, it keeps moving forward and outperforming Java on user experience, performance and features despite being worked on by much smaller teams. I think it stands on its own as a measure of a well-made technology. In addition, you can look at source code and contribute yourself, 90% of what makes .NET run is below. Almost all development happens in the open: https://github.com/dotnet/runtime https://github.com/dotnet/installer https://github.com/dotnet/roslyn https://github.com/dotnet/aspnetcore Could Microsoft do a better job at making it even more community-facing and attempting to make the .NET foundation as a sole owner and steering committee of the language itself? Sure. But it's not that bad either today. Quick reminder - Oracle is not exactly a saint, perhaps even worse (MSFT has never gotten into any litigation even remotely related to .NET or C#). As for career opportunities, as other commenters would note, this is highly specific to a region and does not translate globally. Again, we are discussing the "how good the language/platform is" first and foremost. I don't see startups adopting Go because of the market or trusting Google not to rug pull them...so perhaps we can do a better job so the next language of choice they pick is C#, which has much higher ROI in the hands of the good developers (for example, it can be very easy to adopt as a second language if you are well versed in Rust).
- catlover76 3y ago
  I don't have as much experience or knowledge as others in this thread, but just taking the opportunity to chime in that C# is a great language, and pretty pleasant to work with. And it was a language to which I was introduced as a 24 year old at a venture-backed startup, not at like Boeing or the company Dilbert works at or something. It has features like LINQ. It has routinely had a lot of good updates, new features always coming out, increases in performance, etc. The primary thing lacking has been good support for developing and deploying on Linux, and a couple other devops-related things. It's a shame to see that holding it back, but at least MSFT actually opened up Linux support at all (nobody thought they would).
- bbkane 3y ago
  See https://isdotnetopen.com/ https://isdotnetopen.com/ for why people think .NET has openness issues
Bognar 3y ago
Microsoft uses C# internally and has a vested interest in making it better for all of its own developers, as well as making it good to increase industry adoption so it has a larger pool of skilled developers to hire from. Your arguments about who backs the language don't hold water.
- iopq 3y ago
  Does it have a vested interest to make everything work cross-platform?
  - neonsunset 3y ago
    Well, Linux has won the cloud meaning it is and will be a primary target for .NET. I'm not sure what vested interest MSFT had in some of the changes introduced for iOS in .NET 8, but now it can be targeted with NativeAOT too, so there is clear investment and dev effort both from community contributors and MSFT employees to support various platforms. Somewhat arbitrary example, there is also a project to support RISC-V (https://github.com/dotnet/runtime/issues/84834 https://github.com/dotnet/runtime/issues/84834).
  - Bognar 3y ago
    For both reasons mentioned above, yes. Even internally, many teams in Microsoft are shipping containers on Linux for prod services. Azure is also the big moneymaker, so these days they want all their technologies to have Linux support since that's the dominant cloud OS.

paradite 3y ago

We live in bubbles. In my limited 6 years of professional experience as a software engineer, I have never met a single person who writes C# or .NET.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

paulddraper 3y ago

It's because C# only "recently" became cross platform in a reasonable way. Hard to overstate the mindshare that it lost for that

5e92cb50239222b 3y ago
And it's still not as cross-platform as Java is, or pretty much all other tech stacks. FreeBSD and commercial UNIXen are not supported at all. If you prefer to develop on macOS or Linux (hi there), you don't get access to many Windows-only tools (mostly for debugging and performance measurement). Microsoft only cares about other operating systems to inasmuch as you can host the resulting application there, but really expects you to develop on Windows. Which makes sense... for them.
- neonsunset 3y ago
  For Linux and macOS you can use Rider and CLI tooling (as expected for most other langs), VS Code is up there but obviously does not come with profiling or advanced debugging tools. The bias does exist but it's going away, especially that now a lot of developers are moving over to M-series macs.

devjab 3y ago

It’s because C# is only really nice on the surface. As soon as you actually do something with it that takes it beyond its cozy CRUD, it becomes such a nuisance to work with. We have an ODATA client that we build our selves to use in our React frontend. Now, this would obviously not have been something we also used on the backend if we knew what we know now, but it’s the perfect example to illustrate my decades of experience with C#. We had the client because we use a lot of Office365 and BC36 APIs and they are ODATA, and since we had the client we figured we might as well use ODATA on our internal APIs. Which was all well and good until we tried mixing EntityFramework, ASP versioning and ODATA together. These are all Microsoft packages mind you, and they just don’t work together. They each use the Model builder magic that C# comes with, but they each use it differently enough that things become a nightmare. Which basically sums up why C# has been a terrible language for its entire existence. If you never get to those breaking points, then C# is fine. But when you use it for what you’d assume it was intended for, well… At least the ODATA experience sort of triggered my C# PTSD from back when I wrote an admin system to maintain all the thousands of school printers and computers in a municipality, which was hefty Active Directy work and an absolute nightmare to the point where I literally had to either extend or rewrite half the Microsoft packages because they either weren’t finished or outright terrible (again likely because they weren’t finished). Similar to how the ODATA, ASP versioning and EntiryFramework packages aren’t really finished right now. I mean, I can look at the road map for EF and see some of our issues as planned fixes on who knows when. Anyway, since those days more than a decade ago, it’s become obvious that if you want to do anything AD related then you need to use PowerShell and not C#, really, C# doesn’t even run in Azure runbooks and Python does so it’s obvious that Microsoft themselves don’t really use a whole lot of C# for that part of IT operations internally. And I think it’s frankly the same with a lot of things. The ODATA package seems to fall in that same “not used by Microsoft” box. Because it appears to be some sort of “fork” that’s mostly maintained by a single employee in China. So yes, if you just use regular ASP and EF without versioning or ODATA to do very standard CRUD monolith APIs it’s a language that’s both fast and productive. Sure you’ll still need to do all sorts of silly things with your Azure DevOps pipelines to get EF migrations for Microsoft’s own SQL server to work, but hey, you can. But if you’re actually going to be doing things that takes it beyond it’s “basics” then no, C# is really not the language people are looking for but don’t know about. I’m also partly in the “Java is sort of 10 years late with 21” club, but it’s not like anyone has switched away from Java in those 10 years, and really, it’s not like it was a fun experience to go through the .Net -> .Net Core -> .Net, .Net Standard and .Net Core -> .Net years, so maybe Java did it right?

kaba0 3y ago

Since it is a Java thread, I’m gonna mention that ecosystem-wise, the JVM is just much much bigger and of higher quality - you very often see copied JVM packages in C# with much less features, less stability, and often even being paid. With that said, it is a cool language and platform, that is indeed underhyped.

olavgg 3y ago
This 100x, C# and Java are also very similar programming languages. C# may be a better language, but the difference is minimal. Most C# developers claiming that C# is a better language often don't know Java. I remember one C# guy telling me that Java didn't have closures before Java 8, which was not quite true. Java developers had access to Groovy which had closures. Groovy may be another programming language, but it has always had 99% Java syntax compatibility and they both compile to the same byte code and work seamlessy together. Groovy 4 also has LINQ if you like that. And using Groovy is no harder than including it as a dependency in Gradle/Maven. Java eco system is so vast, and of top notch quality, with excellent documentation available for free. It enables businesses to move faster, at a pace most other languages cannot offer. It's not perfect, especially I find data sciene libraries lacking in Java compared to what the Python eco system offers. But depending on the task I try to choose the right tool for the job, not the same language for every job.
- raziel2p 3y ago
  Groovy is... not Java.
  - olavgg 3y ago
    I think it is, just as Gradle is Java. Groovy is a superset of Java, and makes some parts of Java development better. I for example write many tests with Groovy or implement DSLs for my clients with Groovy.

mrkeen 3y ago

I've written in C#. It's Java. If they're not the same language to you, you need to learn more languages.

equasar 3y ago

Second this. But here in hacker news, C# is hated for no reason, just the old Microsoft mantra and NET Framework

switch007 3y ago

Are you feigning ignorance about why people don’t like Microsoft? We all know C# exists

ahoka 3y ago

Both are horrible languages and while Java libraries are abundant, most are horribly over-engineered, archaic stuff from the 2000s, where everything was about forcing OOP on every problem. Log4j executed code from an ldap server. Insane.