3 ms·

> Microsoft are bundling a lot more into the platform and leaving less to the community. This is a good thing. In Java everything has multiple community offeri

by petilon 19d ago

> Microsoft are bundling a lot more into the platform and leaving less to the community. This is a good thing. In Java everything has multiple community offerings, so before doing anything you have to evaluate the community offerings and decide which one to go with. If you go with the wrong one you may end up having to switch at some point, and that can be painful. This happens so often that most of the time spent when using Java is doing these evaluations and comparisons. With C# you just use the one built into .NET platform. Saves a ton of time.

throwaway91033 19d ago
If someone wants to create a project by assembling bits and pieces from different open source products they can, but many just go for Spring (Boot) and call it a day. All of my projects are based on Spring and I don't really have to look outside of that ecosystem. It almost acts as an aggregator of different open source solutions and often works by abstracting the functionality so that differences are not that big. I recently switched messaging providers and didn't have to change much of my code.
- rwyinuse 19d ago
  Yep, with Spring Boot development is so easy, and even decade old projects are mostly easy to upgrade. I don't have experience from C# or .NET development, but at least compared to Python and especially JS ecosystems it's so much better.
  - hirvi74 19d ago
    > Python and especially JS ecosystems it's so much better. That's a pretty low bar to beat.
    - PaulHoule 19d ago
      10 years ago I was working at a place that was building Python systems that had dependency graphs too complicated for pip to handle. I was able to solve the problem for my system with a "wheelhouse" system that could compute a list of wheels that could be installed to build it but the confidence of my team in Python had flagged. I had a sheaf of notes about the problem and figured out the math to build a proper dependency resolver for Python and tested out a lot of ideas such as being able to use http range requests to get the metadata out of wheels on PyPi without having to download the whole wheel. The problem I had no solution for though was "how to stop developers from trashing the environment that the dependency manager runs in." The data scientists I worked with had an astonishing target for wrecking anything at all. Myself I would have my poetry's environment got bad for reasons I didn't understand every few months ago. I also found the Python community just didn't care that pip didn't really work right. The most seductive form of blub is "I can accept using things that fail intermittently." I got a job coding Java and Javascript and never built the package manager. Then uv came along and managed to sell itself as "crazy fast" which did connect with people more than "correct". Written in rust, uv would have beaten my system in the fast department, and since it is a binary, there is no way anyone can screw up a Python it depends on -- as I see it, both technical and marketing genius!
      - robertlagrant 18d ago
        Before uv came along, pipenv, Poetry, and (much older) Conda all were trying to solve this problem. It's a huge problem for Python that not all languages experience, because Python packages can contain all sorts. At one point if you wanted to install Scipy you had to drag in (and compile, if I remember correctly!) Fortran, of all things[0]. [0] https://stackoverflow.com/a/14822245/61938 https://stackoverflow.com/a/14822245/61938
        PaulHoule 18d ago
        Well Java has a kind of xenophobia that really resists bringing in foreign code but Python is at it's best when it accesses wrappers around C and Fortran. I used conda back in that period, it had a correct solver, and it was easy to manage my own packages, but it was slow in the technical sense of "it takes forever to build an environment" and slow in the business sense in that you got something curated which was not always the greatest or the latest but would, back in the day, "just work." Actually you could vendorize any software you need and have your own conda wheels, like I made wheels with different versions of CUDA drivers which are just DLLs so you could be running models with two versions of tensorflow that required two different versions of CUDA and never have to touch the NVIDIA installer. But today it is a more "just works" experience to use PyPi instead of conda so I don't use conda. Poetry was a big improvement over pip but I don't believe the resolver was 100% correct (like from looking at the source code) and performance was not that good, not so much because it was written in Python but because it did not have a proper cache, did not exploit concurrency. The Python way would be to use a world class SMT solver for the CPU intensive bit but when the bits hit the bus Rust is better at exploiting concurrency. So I am happy to have uv.
  - whizzter 19d ago
    Generally fairly painless in recent years, you need to divide the .NET timeline into original timeline ( .NET 1.0 -> Framework 4.8 ) and "core" lineage/timeline. The Core (smaller, but also properly crossplatform) project begun in 2014, fairly major rewrites with breaking changes in the new releases up until 2019 (.NET Core 3.1) and 2020 (the 5.0 release that became the official major "unification" with most parts of Framework having newer alternatives and being "complete" even if 6.0 and 7.0 patched holes). Projects started with core 3.0/3.1 in 2019 have a pretty easy and clear upgrade path without major breaking changes up until today. It's not JS/Node volatility, and the cleanups in the language/runtime were well worth it in hindsight (still maintaining old 4.8 applications running under IIS), also 4.8 is still nominally supported so there's no immediate stress in upgrading (There are better semantics today, but with huge projects those semantic differences, mainly no lazy-loading by default are a risk).
- MBCook 19d ago
  Yep. Anything else is probably in Apache Commons somewhere.
PaulHoule 19d ago
Sometimes the thing built into the .NET platform is great, sometime it is just crap but developers will use it anyway and it sets back the ecosystem. There is this division of labor between systems programmers and application programmers and often we think systems programmers are better because they know more about algorithms and data structures and compilers and assembly language and such. On the other hand, application developers understand how to reconcile the mental model of managers and employees and customers with computers, reality and common sense and, once they get experienced, see the commonalities between all the run-of-the-mill bizapps that we are coding all the time. Application programmers do a lot better at applications framework than systems programmers and make things like Ruby on Rails and Spring. Systems programmers make terrible things like ASP.NET MVC (I worked out a way to do MVC with ordinary ASP.NET, why couldn't they, with access to the platform internals?)
- moronicles 18d ago
  [dead]
bob1029 19d ago
> If you go with the wrong one you may end up having to switch at some point, and that can be painful. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Log4Shell https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Log4Shell https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/core/install/windows#microsoft-update https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/core/install/window...
pjmlp 18d ago
Which is why there are so many complaints about doing FOSS in .NET, as many companies won't use anything that isn't blessed by Microsoft, and there is an history of Microsoft cloning FOSS projects.

by petilon 19d ago

throwaway91033 19d ago

If someone wants to create a project by assembling bits and pieces from different open source products they can, but many just go for Spring (Boot) and call it a day. All of my projects are based on Spring and I don't really have to look outside of that ecosystem. It almost acts as an aggregator of different open source solutions and often works by abstracting the functionality so that differences are not that big. I recently switched messaging providers and didn't have to change much of my code.

rwyinuse 19d ago
Yep, with Spring Boot development is so easy, and even decade old projects are mostly easy to upgrade. I don't have experience from C# or .NET development, but at least compared to Python and especially JS ecosystems it's so much better.
- hirvi74 19d ago
  > Python and especially JS ecosystems it's so much better. That's a pretty low bar to beat.
  - PaulHoule 19d ago
    10 years ago I was working at a place that was building Python systems that had dependency graphs too complicated for pip to handle. I was able to solve the problem for my system with a "wheelhouse" system that could compute a list of wheels that could be installed to build it but the confidence of my team in Python had flagged. I had a sheaf of notes about the problem and figured out the math to build a proper dependency resolver for Python and tested out a lot of ideas such as being able to use http range requests to get the metadata out of wheels on PyPi without having to download the whole wheel. The problem I had no solution for though was "how to stop developers from trashing the environment that the dependency manager runs in." The data scientists I worked with had an astonishing target for wrecking anything at all. Myself I would have my poetry's environment got bad for reasons I didn't understand every few months ago. I also found the Python community just didn't care that pip didn't really work right. The most seductive form of blub is "I can accept using things that fail intermittently." I got a job coding Java and Javascript and never built the package manager. Then uv came along and managed to sell itself as "crazy fast" which did connect with people more than "correct". Written in rust, uv would have beaten my system in the fast department, and since it is a binary, there is no way anyone can screw up a Python it depends on -- as I see it, both technical and marketing genius!
    - robertlagrant 18d ago
      Before uv came along, pipenv, Poetry, and (much older) Conda all were trying to solve this problem. It's a huge problem for Python that not all languages experience, because Python packages can contain all sorts. At one point if you wanted to install Scipy you had to drag in (and compile, if I remember correctly!) Fortran, of all things[0]. [0] https://stackoverflow.com/a/14822245/61938 https://stackoverflow.com/a/14822245/61938
      - PaulHoule 18d ago
        Well Java has a kind of xenophobia that really resists bringing in foreign code but Python is at it's best when it accesses wrappers around C and Fortran. I used conda back in that period, it had a correct solver, and it was easy to manage my own packages, but it was slow in the technical sense of "it takes forever to build an environment" and slow in the business sense in that you got something curated which was not always the greatest or the latest but would, back in the day, "just work." Actually you could vendorize any software you need and have your own conda wheels, like I made wheels with different versions of CUDA drivers which are just DLLs so you could be running models with two versions of tensorflow that required two different versions of CUDA and never have to touch the NVIDIA installer. But today it is a more "just works" experience to use PyPi instead of conda so I don't use conda. Poetry was a big improvement over pip but I don't believe the resolver was 100% correct (like from looking at the source code) and performance was not that good, not so much because it was written in Python but because it did not have a proper cache, did not exploit concurrency. The Python way would be to use a world class SMT solver for the CPU intensive bit but when the bits hit the bus Rust is better at exploiting concurrency. So I am happy to have uv.
- whizzter 19d ago
  Generally fairly painless in recent years, you need to divide the .NET timeline into original timeline ( .NET 1.0 -> Framework 4.8 ) and "core" lineage/timeline. The Core (smaller, but also properly crossplatform) project begun in 2014, fairly major rewrites with breaking changes in the new releases up until 2019 (.NET Core 3.1) and 2020 (the 5.0 release that became the official major "unification" with most parts of Framework having newer alternatives and being "complete" even if 6.0 and 7.0 patched holes). Projects started with core 3.0/3.1 in 2019 have a pretty easy and clear upgrade path without major breaking changes up until today. It's not JS/Node volatility, and the cleanups in the language/runtime were well worth it in hindsight (still maintaining old 4.8 applications running under IIS), also 4.8 is still nominally supported so there's no immediate stress in upgrading (There are better semantics today, but with huge projects those semantic differences, mainly no lazy-loading by default are a risk).
MBCook 19d ago
Yep. Anything else is probably in Apache Commons somewhere.

PaulHoule 19d ago

Sometimes the thing built into the .NET platform is great, sometime it is just crap but developers will use it anyway and it sets back the ecosystem. There is this division of labor between systems programmers and application programmers and often we think systems programmers are better because they know more about algorithms and data structures and compilers and assembly language and such. On the other hand, application developers understand how to reconcile the mental model of managers and employees and customers with computers, reality and common sense and, once they get experienced, see the commonalities between all the run-of-the-mill bizapps that we are coding all the time. Application programmers do a lot better at applications framework than systems programmers and make things like Ruby on Rails and Spring. Systems programmers make terrible things like ASP.NET MVC (I worked out a way to do MVC with ordinary ASP.NET, why couldn't they, with access to the platform internals?)

moronicles 18d ago
[dead]

bob1029 19d ago

> If you go with the wrong one you may end up having to switch at some point, and that can be painful. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Log4Shell https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Log4Shell https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/core/install/windows#microsoft-update https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/core/install/window...

pjmlp 18d ago

Which is why there are so many complaints about doing FOSS in .NET, as many companies won't use anything that isn't blessed by Microsoft, and there is an history of Microsoft cloning FOSS projects.