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Microsoft scares me, for no good reason. Would, say, a Ruby or node.js-oriented web developer find the F#/.NET community lacking, incomplete, unfriendly, uncool

Microsoft scares me, for no good reason. Would, say, a Ruby or node.js-oriented web developer find the F#/.NET community lacking, incomplete, unfriendly, uncool? Is there even a community to speak of? What's to stop a young developer from going against the grain and adopting .NET? (Here come the downvotes. Shun the "hipster." But really, I'm looking for a subjective perspective from somebody on "the other side." I don't even know how to search for ".NET" on Github. For instance, is NuGet anything like npm or gem?)

jsprogrammer 11y ago
Hunh? C# was one of my first professional languages and I used it for five years. It's an excellent language and many people use it. What 'grain' do you think you are going against? The more platforms and languages you get exposed to, the more informed choices you'll be able to make in the future.
- msutherl 11y ago
  Subjective, but I've never met a C# developer and I know approximately zero developers who run Windows.
  - TillE 11y ago
    Not everyone is a web developer or working on mobile apps. Games and business software are two huge industries which are almost entirely Windows. Everyone using the massively popular Unity engine is a C# developer.
    - M8 11y ago
      > Not everyone is ... working on mobile apps http://blog.xamarin.com/xamarin-passes-1-million-developer-milestone/ http://blog.xamarin.com/xamarin-passes-1-million-developer-m...
  - deleted 11y ago
    [deleted]
  - ripberge 11y ago
    The .NET community is extremely large, perhaps you run in a small circle. A job search on indeed.com (a job listing consolidator) within 25 miles of my area, Santa Monica, CA reveals 2,477 jobs for .NET 2,083 jobs for Java 1,284 jobs for python 685 jobs for Ruby Here are # of questions with following tags on StackOverflow: Java: 845,330 C#: 786,850 Python: 417,737 Ruby: 132,074 I can't speak for the rest of the world, but I would guess if you looked at 200 of the largest companies in Los Angeles, 90% of them have at least some .NET code running for something. It's pretty ubiquitous.
    - noir_lord 11y ago
      Damn would I like to live somewhere that has 1284 Python jobs listed, over here in the UK .Net (outside the web) dominates, love me some C# but Python just isn't on the radar at all (yet it's widely used internally).
  - gagege 11y ago
    That's pretty crazy. Where I live and work, almost everyone mostly does C#. And, even the PHP developers I know run Windows for some reason.
apalmer 11y ago
F# in particular is not a 'mainstream' .Net language, its community is more similar to the Haskell community than the general .NET community. For a young developer in 2015 really no reason not to use .NET. Other than its just not as popular, which is good enough reason. For older folks the main stumbling block is... Microsoft has run long and brutal cons before. If your memory is long you just don't trust them.they are doing everything right... But still.
itgoon 11y ago
It is somewhat lacking in the community. What's there is quite friendly, cool, and often doing neat things. There just isn't as many libraries as, say, Python, because there aren't as many people. I'd say learn the MS ecosystem for the same reason I learned Linux way back when: a different perspective. You'll see all the same things, but sometimes done a different way. Not necessarily better or worse, just different. I'm pretty confident you'll have at least one "that's a great way to do that" moment. Maybe you'll come away from the experience much as I have: I don't really care what the tech is. Will it do what I need it to? It also has made picking up "new" tech (ain't nuthin' new) really easy. Oh, and search for "dotnet". Most places use that. Google will search for ".net" if you add in "C#" or something.
kolektiv 11y ago
I hope you don't get downvoted, those seems like reasonable questions. I'm part of the F# community I guess, so I suppose I could try and answer! I'm not sure the F# community is the same as the broader .NET community. I think at the moment, with functional programming being a little more niche still, it's perhaps quite self-selecting. It has a lot of people in who really care. I think that's a good thing - I hope - but obviously the broader .NET community is perhaps more heterogenous - it can feel quite enterprise-y or business-y in places, unsurprisingly. I hope the F# community wouldn't be found lacking, unfriendly, etc. We certainly try hard to be welcoming and inclusive, and I think generally do OK - although we could do better I'm sure, as could every community. There probably isn't as much open source in the .NET world as there is for Ruby/Node as much as anything else because of the backgrounds of the languages and communities (Microsoft has a strong influence over certain parts) but there is still quite a lot, with some very enthusiastic smart folk. What's stopping people adopting it? Probably too long an answer for here. I would say that I think there are fewer and fewer things preventing adoption as time goes on, especially with F#, and there are some cool startups trying to do big things. I'd like to think it's friendly, and I'd also like to think it's always open to ideas from other communities. If you wanted to chat as Ruby or Node dev (or anything else) I hope you'd be welcomed. (Final note - NuGet is kind of like NPM yes - it's a common binary packaging form for dependency management. It has flaws, but is commonly used, and is certainly better than nothing. In the F# world at least, Paket is doing very well - it's compatible with NuGet packages, but perhaps slightly more accurate about using and managing them!)
- istvan__ 11y ago
  I wish there was a some info on how to get CLR (not Mono) get up and running on Mac with C#, F# etc.
  - rattray 11y ago
    brew tap aspnet/dnx brew update brew install dnvm dnvm upgrade From https://github.com/aspnet/Home/blob/dev/README.md#os-x https://github.com/aspnet/Home/blob/dev/README.md#os-x There are some hello world examples in the repo listed above as well. If you'd like, you can develop with the recently announced Visual Studio Code, announced ~yesterday. I think this is still Mono, but full MSFT support of *Nix is said to be underway.
rfrey 11y ago
If I may, I think you're harvesting downvotes (very light grey as I write this) because your phrasing could read that Microsoft the company is frightening you because they're the Big Evil, etc... this being one of the inevitable (and inevitably tiresome) derailing comments that enters any thread about Microsoft and immediately gets downvotes because Boring. After I re-read your comment it seemed you might be saying Microsoft tech intimidates you, perhaps because of the perception of it being big enterprise, dominated by Chief Poobah Architects, etc. Ambiguity's a funny thing. :)
- msutherl 11y ago
  That's fair. I say Microsoft "scares" me because it's historically "uncool," which means it's likely that the (open source) developer community is less dynamic and comprehensive. People are rightfully picky about the work they do for free!
  - doorhammer 11y ago
    This is almost an aside, but you should take a look at some of the stuff that comes out of Microsoft Research. They employ some of the biggest names in Haskell (Simon Peyton Jones for one) and have done some really interesting and bleeding edge work.
  - crdoconnor 11y ago
    It used to scare me because it abused its market dominance in much the same way Google does and because its ultimate end goal is inevitably end user lock-in, which is something I want to avoid at all costs. It's true that they have changed over the last couple of years and have adopted open source, etc., but it seems to me that this isn't really because they've become intrinsically "less evil" - it's just because the market has forced their hand, and they now have to choose between future irrelevance and not being evil now. I am pretty confident that if they once again gain a powerful monopoly like they used to have, they'll abuse it just like they did the last time. One way they could do that is to bait and switch on open source/linux versions of .NET. I've looked at F# and it is a nice language, but I don't really want to do any OSS development on it unless Microsoft somehow convinces me with a license that handcuffs future Microsoft so that they won't be able to do that (e.g. GPL, assuming that would work. IANAL).
profquail 11y ago
I've been developing with F# for about 4 years now, and ever since the beginning I've found the F# community to be wonderfully helpful and friendly. The community is, for sure, smaller than the Ruby or node.js communities but I think that's kind of nice since it makes it easier to get to know everyone personally. If you're interested in F#, or even if you just want to dip your toe in, I recommend checking out your local F# meetup. I've learned a lot there over the years and made some great friends too.
bad_user 11y ago
From my experience thus far the .NET community is not friendly to open-source. Yes, open-source projects do exist, but those are few and far between, being either ports from the Java world, or throwaways that failed as commercial projects. There are also instances of bait and switch, as in projects starting as open-source being closed later (e.g. ServiceStack). Also compare RoboVM.com with Xamarin.com. If you'll dig into the details, you'll see similarities (like comparable pricing), with one important difference ... RoboVM is open-source and you only need a subscription for extra goodies. Same thing with IntelliJ IDEA versus Visual Studio. I find this difference to be the essence of the .NET ecosystem versus the others. You mentioned NuGet, which is like `gem`. Well, the build tools in .NET land suck really badly. You've got MSBuild, which is like Ant or Make and that's what everybody uses, because development in .NET-land is Visual Studio driven. What you don't have for example is something like Maven (or SBT, or Lein). There's been nothing like it in .NET land. The ASP.NET developers have been building an alternative, in the form of dnvm / dnx / dnu, but it's just getting started, being a work in progress and feeling hack-ish and incomplete. Fingers crossed. Anyway, in spite of the fact that there are companies that have built their own build tools because the current status quo sucks so badly (and I know more than one), the .NET community is filled with closed-minded folks that will never admit that their tooling sucks and I'm even including Visual Studio itself in this mix, since an IDE that needs extra investments into ReSharper is not that good in my opinion. And then there's Mono, the current cross-platform implementation and the answer to folks that want to develop and deploy on Linux, OS X, Android or iOS. Except that Mono is and has historically been full of bugs. Like if you want to do server side development and deploy on Mono, just forget about it. And these days Xamarin is focusing only on mobile development and the community is dead. > Would, say, a Ruby or node.js-oriented web developer find the F#/.NET community lacking, incomplete, unfriendly, uncool? Is there even a community to speak of? The answer in my opinion is yes. This may change, given recent efforts by Microsoft, however evolution will be slow because the whole ecosystem has to change, not just Microsoft.
- tdestan 11y ago
  >... and I'm even including Visual Studio itself in this mix, since an IDE that needs extra investments into ReSharper is not that good in my opinion. That's a fair point, but even so, I've yet to find an IDE/editor/whatever that compares favorably to the combination of Visual Studio + Resharper + NCrunch.

jsprogrammer 11y ago

Hunh? C# was one of my first professional languages and I used it for five years. It's an excellent language and many people use it. What 'grain' do you think you are going against? The more platforms and languages you get exposed to, the more informed choices you'll be able to make in the future.

msutherl 11y ago
Subjective, but I've never met a C# developer and I know approximately zero developers who run Windows.
- TillE 11y ago
  Not everyone is a web developer or working on mobile apps. Games and business software are two huge industries which are almost entirely Windows. Everyone using the massively popular Unity engine is a C# developer.
  - M8 11y ago
    > Not everyone is ... working on mobile apps http://blog.xamarin.com/xamarin-passes-1-million-developer-milestone/ http://blog.xamarin.com/xamarin-passes-1-million-developer-m...
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
- ripberge 11y ago
  The .NET community is extremely large, perhaps you run in a small circle. A job search on indeed.com (a job listing consolidator) within 25 miles of my area, Santa Monica, CA reveals 2,477 jobs for .NET 2,083 jobs for Java 1,284 jobs for python 685 jobs for Ruby Here are # of questions with following tags on StackOverflow: Java: 845,330 C#: 786,850 Python: 417,737 Ruby: 132,074 I can't speak for the rest of the world, but I would guess if you looked at 200 of the largest companies in Los Angeles, 90% of them have at least some .NET code running for something. It's pretty ubiquitous.
  - noir_lord 11y ago
    Damn would I like to live somewhere that has 1284 Python jobs listed, over here in the UK .Net (outside the web) dominates, love me some C# but Python just isn't on the radar at all (yet it's widely used internally).
- gagege 11y ago
  That's pretty crazy. Where I live and work, almost everyone mostly does C#. And, even the PHP developers I know run Windows for some reason.

apalmer 11y ago

F# in particular is not a 'mainstream' .Net language, its community is more similar to the Haskell community than the general .NET community. For a young developer in 2015 really no reason not to use .NET. Other than its just not as popular, which is good enough reason. For older folks the main stumbling block is... Microsoft has run long and brutal cons before. If your memory is long you just don't trust them.they are doing everything right... But still.

itgoon 11y ago

It is somewhat lacking in the community. What's there is quite friendly, cool, and often doing neat things. There just isn't as many libraries as, say, Python, because there aren't as many people. I'd say learn the MS ecosystem for the same reason I learned Linux way back when: a different perspective. You'll see all the same things, but sometimes done a different way. Not necessarily better or worse, just different. I'm pretty confident you'll have at least one "that's a great way to do that" moment. Maybe you'll come away from the experience much as I have: I don't really care what the tech is. Will it do what I need it to? It also has made picking up "new" tech (ain't nuthin' new) really easy. Oh, and search for "dotnet". Most places use that. Google will search for ".net" if you add in "C#" or something.

kolektiv 11y ago

I hope you don't get downvoted, those seems like reasonable questions. I'm part of the F# community I guess, so I suppose I could try and answer! I'm not sure the F# community is the same as the broader .NET community. I think at the moment, with functional programming being a little more niche still, it's perhaps quite self-selecting. It has a lot of people in who really care. I think that's a good thing - I hope - but obviously the broader .NET community is perhaps more heterogenous - it can feel quite enterprise-y or business-y in places, unsurprisingly. I hope the F# community wouldn't be found lacking, unfriendly, etc. We certainly try hard to be welcoming and inclusive, and I think generally do OK - although we could do better I'm sure, as could every community. There probably isn't as much open source in the .NET world as there is for Ruby/Node as much as anything else because of the backgrounds of the languages and communities (Microsoft has a strong influence over certain parts) but there is still quite a lot, with some very enthusiastic smart folk. What's stopping people adopting it? Probably too long an answer for here. I would say that I think there are fewer and fewer things preventing adoption as time goes on, especially with F#, and there are some cool startups trying to do big things. I'd like to think it's friendly, and I'd also like to think it's always open to ideas from other communities. If you wanted to chat as Ruby or Node dev (or anything else) I hope you'd be welcomed. (Final note - NuGet is kind of like NPM yes - it's a common binary packaging form for dependency management. It has flaws, but is commonly used, and is certainly better than nothing. In the F# world at least, Paket is doing very well - it's compatible with NuGet packages, but perhaps slightly more accurate about using and managing them!)

istvan__ 11y ago
I wish there was a some info on how to get CLR (not Mono) get up and running on Mac with C#, F# etc.
- rattray 11y ago
  brew tap aspnet/dnx brew update brew install dnvm dnvm upgrade From https://github.com/aspnet/Home/blob/dev/README.md#os-x https://github.com/aspnet/Home/blob/dev/README.md#os-x There are some hello world examples in the repo listed above as well. If you'd like, you can develop with the recently announced Visual Studio Code, announced ~yesterday. I think this is still Mono, but full MSFT support of *Nix is said to be underway.

rfrey 11y ago

If I may, I think you're harvesting downvotes (very light grey as I write this) because your phrasing could read that Microsoft the company is frightening you because they're the Big Evil, etc... this being one of the inevitable (and inevitably tiresome) derailing comments that enters any thread about Microsoft and immediately gets downvotes because Boring. After I re-read your comment it seemed you might be saying Microsoft tech intimidates you, perhaps because of the perception of it being big enterprise, dominated by Chief Poobah Architects, etc. Ambiguity's a funny thing. :)

msutherl 11y ago
That's fair. I say Microsoft "scares" me because it's historically "uncool," which means it's likely that the (open source) developer community is less dynamic and comprehensive. People are rightfully picky about the work they do for free!
- doorhammer 11y ago
  This is almost an aside, but you should take a look at some of the stuff that comes out of Microsoft Research. They employ some of the biggest names in Haskell (Simon Peyton Jones for one) and have done some really interesting and bleeding edge work.
- crdoconnor 11y ago
  It used to scare me because it abused its market dominance in much the same way Google does and because its ultimate end goal is inevitably end user lock-in, which is something I want to avoid at all costs. It's true that they have changed over the last couple of years and have adopted open source, etc., but it seems to me that this isn't really because they've become intrinsically "less evil" - it's just because the market has forced their hand, and they now have to choose between future irrelevance and not being evil now. I am pretty confident that if they once again gain a powerful monopoly like they used to have, they'll abuse it just like they did the last time. One way they could do that is to bait and switch on open source/linux versions of .NET. I've looked at F# and it is a nice language, but I don't really want to do any OSS development on it unless Microsoft somehow convinces me with a license that handcuffs future Microsoft so that they won't be able to do that (e.g. GPL, assuming that would work. IANAL).

profquail 11y ago

I've been developing with F# for about 4 years now, and ever since the beginning I've found the F# community to be wonderfully helpful and friendly. The community is, for sure, smaller than the Ruby or node.js communities but I think that's kind of nice since it makes it easier to get to know everyone personally. If you're interested in F#, or even if you just want to dip your toe in, I recommend checking out your local F# meetup. I've learned a lot there over the years and made some great friends too.

bad_user 11y ago

From my experience thus far the .NET community is not friendly to open-source. Yes, open-source projects do exist, but those are few and far between, being either ports from the Java world, or throwaways that failed as commercial projects. There are also instances of bait and switch, as in projects starting as open-source being closed later (e.g. ServiceStack). Also compare RoboVM.com with Xamarin.com. If you'll dig into the details, you'll see similarities (like comparable pricing), with one important difference ... RoboVM is open-source and you only need a subscription for extra goodies. Same thing with IntelliJ IDEA versus Visual Studio. I find this difference to be the essence of the .NET ecosystem versus the others. You mentioned NuGet, which is like `gem`. Well, the build tools in .NET land suck really badly. You've got MSBuild, which is like Ant or Make and that's what everybody uses, because development in .NET-land is Visual Studio driven. What you don't have for example is something like Maven (or SBT, or Lein). There's been nothing like it in .NET land. The ASP.NET developers have been building an alternative, in the form of dnvm / dnx / dnu, but it's just getting started, being a work in progress and feeling hack-ish and incomplete. Fingers crossed. Anyway, in spite of the fact that there are companies that have built their own build tools because the current status quo sucks so badly (and I know more than one), the .NET community is filled with closed-minded folks that will never admit that their tooling sucks and I'm even including Visual Studio itself in this mix, since an IDE that needs extra investments into ReSharper is not that good in my opinion. And then there's Mono, the current cross-platform implementation and the answer to folks that want to develop and deploy on Linux, OS X, Android or iOS. Except that Mono is and has historically been full of bugs. Like if you want to do server side development and deploy on Mono, just forget about it. And these days Xamarin is focusing only on mobile development and the community is dead. > Would, say, a Ruby or node.js-oriented web developer find the F#/.NET community lacking, incomplete, unfriendly, uncool? Is there even a community to speak of? The answer in my opinion is yes. This may change, given recent efforts by Microsoft, however evolution will be slow because the whole ecosystem has to change, not just Microsoft.

tdestan 11y ago
>... and I'm even including Visual Studio itself in this mix, since an IDE that needs extra investments into ReSharper is not that good in my opinion. That's a fair point, but even so, I've yet to find an IDE/editor/whatever that compares favorably to the combination of Visual Studio + Resharper + NCrunch.