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"Tracebit is a B2B SaaS Security Product. If you did a straw poll of Engineers - especially readers of a certain orange website - about the ‘best’ language for

"Tracebit is a B2B SaaS Security Product. If you did a straw poll of Engineers - especially readers of a certain orange website - about the ‘best’ language for such a system, I think the common responses would include Python, TypeScript, Golang, Rust, something JVM-y, maybe Elixir" I guess everyone likes to be the underdog, but thruth is the B2B space is dominated by the duopoly of Java and .Net and shows no signs of changing. The author is imho cosplaying as a contrarian while being solidly mainstream.

miki123211 2y ago
I think C# has the highest ratio of (happy) programmers to internet discussions, at least among mainstream languages. This makes it look a lot less popular and cool for people outside the ecosystem. I think that it's also much more common with companies that aren't primarily tech-focused, as those companies usually have cosy relationships with Microsoft. Pure tech companies, startups and FAANGs don't seem to use it much. This also ties into geography. In the US, far more people work for startups, FAANGs and pure tech companies than in Europe, where traditional businesses and "software houses" are far more prevalent, which means there's far more C# there.
- neonsunset 2y ago
  Which is a shame, because C# is usually better at the problems many startups try to make Go work at. It is a significantly stronger offering if you treat it as a middle ground between C++ and Rust family and Go/Java family. It is the cool and modern language in today's landscape. But it is popular among the companies which use it the opposite way. Now, we shouldn't complain too much. Because this is what made .NET survive in the first place. But I wish more people looked at projects like Garnet, Ryujinx, various greenfield HPC and highload libraries in the ecosystem over yet another CRUD template. Business domain modeling is much better done in F# anyway!
  - rednafi 2y ago
    I can understand advocating for C# over the mess that is JavaScript, but with Go, it’s a different story. Startups choose Go because no one I know is excited about working with GoF-style OO code these days. It’s easier to hire for and faster than C# for most workloads. Yes, you can write C# in a data-oriented way, but no one does. So diving into an existing codebase means dealing with OO encumbrances, and not everyone wants that. The compilation time is fast, and so is the startup time. Cross-platform compilation with a single command and a single binary makes life easier. On top of that, most infra tooling—Grafana, Prometheus, Kubernetes, Terraform—is written in Go, so choosing Go for the backend comes with a ton of advantages over C#. I can personally attest that this is exactly why Uber and now DoorDash have chosen Go over the alternatives.
    - neonsunset 2y ago
      I really should up my shill game...not even in a top 10 language shills on hackernews nowadays :( Also, no. Go comes with certain limitations C# is completely free from. It's a stronger language for greenfield projects :) And if you are intentionally writing bad code, Go is much more fragile when you do so. It is extremely unlikely a startup would write C# in the style you dislike. Such style is not even inherent to C# and you will find plenty of convoluted and overabstracted Go code now that there is an influx of developers in Go ecosystem moving from other languages. And a good deal of really verbose and equally hard to read code added by new features as Go tries to tackle the projects of complexity it was not designed for.
    - exceptione 2y ago
      People can over abstract in almost any language. The problem is that most developers, especially beginners, are not great at finding the right balance. What you miss is experience in good design. Now Go handles that by delivering a deliberately limited language. This has its pros when you have a load of hires fresh out of college. Some wise people saw it from the beginning that the language designers had went too far with their limits, and so now things need to be bolted on the language. But I think some choices are unfortunate and cannot be repaired. ------------ If you want to go functional, want a powerful Hindley-Millner type system that is not too advanced, you should look at F#. You have the full SDK, you can still sprinkle in some OOP, have C# and C interop, you can still declare some types as mutable if needed, you have proper SUM types... the list goes on. But in my view, no language can replace design skills. A good team has at least one senior who primarily coaches juniors wrt to design.
rednafi 2y ago
The author is most likely too young to have experienced this trend and has now rediscovered the joy of stability. Choosing Java, C#, or even Go offers a huge advantage in terms of stability, which takes years of experience to truly appreciate. I’m loving the fact that the industry is getting tired of Node in the backend and the tech debt it incurs after a few years. Rediscovering old values and getting excited about them is perfectly okay. Nobody remembers all of history—reinvention is part of the process.
- mattgreenrocks 2y ago
  Yep. You’ll wake up one day and realize the tech itself is not the interesting part — it was understanding and solving problems for people. Thus, anything that gets in the way of that is not worth it.
whoknowsidont 2y ago
[flagged]
- neonsunset 2y ago
  You still posting? Impressive. One thing I don't understand however is a complaint about getting higher quality comments than the ones you respond with. Hard data? Who cares about it, we're posting opinion pieces and vibes!
  - whoknowsidont 2y ago
    What do you mean by "still" posting? Are you monitoring my account and following me around?

miki123211 2y ago

I think C# has the highest ratio of (happy) programmers to internet discussions, at least among mainstream languages. This makes it look a lot less popular and cool for people outside the ecosystem. I think that it's also much more common with companies that aren't primarily tech-focused, as those companies usually have cosy relationships with Microsoft. Pure tech companies, startups and FAANGs don't seem to use it much. This also ties into geography. In the US, far more people work for startups, FAANGs and pure tech companies than in Europe, where traditional businesses and "software houses" are far more prevalent, which means there's far more C# there.

neonsunset 2y ago
Which is a shame, because C# is usually better at the problems many startups try to make Go work at. It is a significantly stronger offering if you treat it as a middle ground between C++ and Rust family and Go/Java family. It is the cool and modern language in today's landscape. But it is popular among the companies which use it the opposite way. Now, we shouldn't complain too much. Because this is what made .NET survive in the first place. But I wish more people looked at projects like Garnet, Ryujinx, various greenfield HPC and highload libraries in the ecosystem over yet another CRUD template. Business domain modeling is much better done in F# anyway!
- rednafi 2y ago
  I can understand advocating for C# over the mess that is JavaScript, but with Go, it’s a different story. Startups choose Go because no one I know is excited about working with GoF-style OO code these days. It’s easier to hire for and faster than C# for most workloads. Yes, you can write C# in a data-oriented way, but no one does. So diving into an existing codebase means dealing with OO encumbrances, and not everyone wants that. The compilation time is fast, and so is the startup time. Cross-platform compilation with a single command and a single binary makes life easier. On top of that, most infra tooling—Grafana, Prometheus, Kubernetes, Terraform—is written in Go, so choosing Go for the backend comes with a ton of advantages over C#. I can personally attest that this is exactly why Uber and now DoorDash have chosen Go over the alternatives.
  - neonsunset 2y ago
    I really should up my shill game...not even in a top 10 language shills on hackernews nowadays :( Also, no. Go comes with certain limitations C# is completely free from. It's a stronger language for greenfield projects :) And if you are intentionally writing bad code, Go is much more fragile when you do so. It is extremely unlikely a startup would write C# in the style you dislike. Such style is not even inherent to C# and you will find plenty of convoluted and overabstracted Go code now that there is an influx of developers in Go ecosystem moving from other languages. And a good deal of really verbose and equally hard to read code added by new features as Go tries to tackle the projects of complexity it was not designed for.
  - exceptione 2y ago
    People can over abstract in almost any language. The problem is that most developers, especially beginners, are not great at finding the right balance. What you miss is experience in good design. Now Go handles that by delivering a deliberately limited language. This has its pros when you have a load of hires fresh out of college. Some wise people saw it from the beginning that the language designers had went too far with their limits, and so now things need to be bolted on the language. But I think some choices are unfortunate and cannot be repaired. ------------ If you want to go functional, want a powerful Hindley-Millner type system that is not too advanced, you should look at F#. You have the full SDK, you can still sprinkle in some OOP, have C# and C interop, you can still declare some types as mutable if needed, you have proper SUM types... the list goes on. But in my view, no language can replace design skills. A good team has at least one senior who primarily coaches juniors wrt to design.

rednafi 2y ago

The author is most likely too young to have experienced this trend and has now rediscovered the joy of stability. Choosing Java, C#, or even Go offers a huge advantage in terms of stability, which takes years of experience to truly appreciate. I’m loving the fact that the industry is getting tired of Node in the backend and the tech debt it incurs after a few years. Rediscovering old values and getting excited about them is perfectly okay. Nobody remembers all of history—reinvention is part of the process.

mattgreenrocks 2y ago
Yep. You’ll wake up one day and realize the tech itself is not the interesting part — it was understanding and solving problems for people. Thus, anything that gets in the way of that is not worth it.

whoknowsidont 2y ago

[flagged]

neonsunset 2y ago
You still posting? Impressive. One thing I don't understand however is a complaint about getting higher quality comments than the ones you respond with. Hard data? Who cares about it, we're posting opinion pieces and vibes!
- whoknowsidont 2y ago
  What do you mean by "still" posting? Are you monitoring my account and following me around?