.NET: So long and thanks for all the fish

http://lucisferre.net/2012/02/08/dot-net-so-long-and-thanks-for-all-the-fish/

by pitdesi • 14 years ago

85 102 14 years ago

Gotta admit that I'm getting to that point too, so good for you. I've been working with the .NET stack since the beta, and at this point in my career I dabble in other languages, but keep coming back to the bread and butter since "that's what I know". All the while I'm involved in the ALT.NET community secretly eyeing Rails and Python wondering when and if I can take a hard left and make the jump. I'm sick of working in the .NET box where we get excited about tools and features that were released years ago on other stacks, just to have a port done that's about 3/4 as good as the original.

tl;dr; good for you man.

vyrotek3• 14 years ago

Is there a support group for folks like us? :)

mmcconnell1618• 14 years ago

I released a commercial .NET app 2 weeks after the official 1.0 release and am still using the framework. I've dabbled in Ruby, Java, JS, written an iPad application, etc. I have my gripes with some of the .NET tools but I really like C# as a language. My biggest gripe is the business decisions made by Microsoft over the past few years. Under Gates, Microsoft really understood the developers created their monopoly. Under Balmer it feels like Microsoft wants to extract every ounce of blood from developers which is ultimately going to bring down the house.

jader201• 14 years ago

After seeing a few blogs like this, I was starting to get the general impression that C# and .NET were dying out.

However, according to the TIOBE Index [1], C# was actually second in growth in 2011, just behind Objective C. Not sure how reliable that is, but thought it was an interesting (and unexpected) trend.

[1] http://www.tiobe.com/index.php/content/paperinfo/tpci/index....

dexen• 14 years ago

Influx of new developers != increasing utility of the language, especially for seasoned devs.

As the OP notes, It seems as though the whole philosophy of .NET centres on catering to the novice, but even as the novice evolves into the “advanced beginner” they inevitably find they want and need more.

elemeno2• 14 years ago

With everything that's been and being added to C#, I'd argue that it keeps getting more and more interesting for experienced developers and further away from novices.

Your typical novice developer is going to have a hell of a time trying to understand any non-trivial C# projects these days with all the function features that have been added - especially with things like PLINQ and TPL.

The utility for experienced developers has increased over the years, it's accessibly to inexperienced developers has, however, decreased.

recoiledsnake2• 14 years ago

I think the argument is about viability of a career choice. New developers don't come up in a vacuum if there's no demand, they'll quickly switch to something that pays the bills.

Is there any indicator(other than a few HN posts) that .NET (or # of seasoned devs in .NET) is actually in decline?

tikhonj2• 14 years ago

I think there's some significant selection bias on HN, particularly against Windows and Microsoft. It seems a disproportionate amount of the people here are using Python/Ruby on OS X, so naturally you'll get more articles about moving to that sort of stack and away from .NET and the like than the opposite.

In reality, .NET is actually a very interesting platform. LINQ is actually really cool and C# is largely a better language than Java. If this isn't enough, you can always use F# which is a very nice functional, statically typed language based on OCaml. On top of this, MSR produces interesting research in programming languages, which can easily be subsumed by their product languages. There is actually a healthy exchange of ideas between Haskell and the .NET languages, for example, even going both ways. (Haskell recently got some features from LINQ, for example.)

thesz• 14 years ago

What are those LINQ features you're talking about?

recoiledsnake2• 14 years ago

>After seeing a few blogs like this

The reason you see blogs like this that some in HN reflexively vote up anything that is anti-.NET or anti-MS.

Around a 50% use Macs and a significant percentage use Ruby, Node et al. Since people tend to vote up things that make them feel good, 'OMG .NET IS TEH SUX' posts tend to get on top.

127001brewer• 14 years ago

The "tl;dr;" version:

I just want languages, tools and frameworks to help me get work done and then get out of my way. Is Rails a clean code panacea? Is Javascript elegant? No. However, am I more productive, less burdened and do I have more options and flexibility? Absolutely. I am far less frustrated trying to produce elegant, clear, extensible and maintainable solutions in these dynamic languages. I also find that dynamic languages, modern web frameworks and -nix is just more fun.

untog2• 14 years ago

I'm also primarily a .NET dev, using ASP.NET MVC. But for my most recent project I used node, and I'm hooked. Probably because it allowed me to take existing JS knowledge and apply it, but still. ASP.NET MVC just feels too heavyweight afterwards.

That said, whenever using something other than C# I miss LINQ. It's awesome.

benologist• 14 years ago

I've been working a lot with node lately as well, there are some things I like but some I miss so much from C# ... there is nothing anywhere near as good as VS for node, and god I miss ReSharper and compilation errors.

jpastika2• 14 years ago

Funny to say you miss "compilation errors", but as someone who works with ASP.NET MVC during the day and RoR at night, I know what you mean.

vyrotek3• 14 years ago

I'll admit it. Losing that is a bit scary in some ways. It does lead to some laziness though. But sometimes it's awesome to remove a property from an object and have the compiler tell you all the places that are broken now.

On a similar note. I've followed your Playtomic blog a bit and it helped me make the jump to MongoDB for our gamification platform. (We still use SqlServer for lots of things though) Here's to trying new types of kool-aid! :)

spamizbad• 14 years ago

I had the same frustration, until I finally broke down and just fed my JS through jshint (http://www.jshint.com/). Keep a JS console open while developing and have it display relevant parts of the returned object you care about.

Unfortunately there's no reSharper for JS but eh... I feel like it's not as necessary with JS as its a fundamentally simpler language than C#.

vyrotek3• 14 years ago

I'm a .Net engineer who feels like this day will also come for myself very soon. Don't get me wrong, I love .Net. It has treated me well and I love the direction that Microsoft is going with Azure, their adoption of open source, and the resources they provide for startups.

Sometimes it's just hard to 'switch over' like the author as done. I've done plenty with Java and PHP too but there's nothing there that excites me really. So now I'm dabbling with Python to see if there are any sparks there. Have I made a good choice? I guess we'll see.

I do find it interesting that you don't seem to hear people say things like "I'm done with Ruby, switching to Python". People make a bigger deal of leaving .Net and Java as if it's something you'll never go back to.

gaius2• 14 years ago

Why not try F#? That's a genuinely awesome language, an ML usable in the "real world".

lucisferre6• 14 years ago

I tiptoed around this a bit, but I think F# is great. I have little experience with it, but I work with someone who has been using it pretty extensively for a bit and we've talked about it a number of times.

This, however, is where the environment/culture issue (that I also danced around) comes into play. In most .NET shops it would be extremely hard if not almost impossible to bring in another programming paradigm like functional, let alone mix it. This is perhaps a bit ironic considering most of the same places use javascript, but if they could write C# instead of javascript on the client side, I'm certain most would (in fact when ASP.NET first made this somewhat possible it was the norm until people got bitten by all the pitfalls).

FreakLegion• 14 years ago

No need to leave .NET behind if you take up Python. Check out IronPython[1], which gives you all the resources of Python and .NET.

[1] http://ironpython.codeplex.com/

espeed• 14 years ago

> you don't seem to hear people say things like "I'm done with Ruby, switching to Python

No, it's usually more along the lines of, "Ruby is beautiful (but I’m moving to Python)" (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3179370 :)

pragmatic2• 14 years ago

.NET is finally mature enough to get the "I'm leaving" posts.

There were plenty of these in heady times of '06 and the Ruby rush. Except with Java.

I'm sure at some point there were some for Cobol and Fortran and C and C++.

lucisferre6• 14 years ago

You seem to be defending .NET with a lot of handwaving. How exactly does one demonstrate that "I'm leaving" == maturity. By your reasoning then, anyone leaving what they feel to be a failed language/framework automatically proves it's maturity by doing so. I don't get it.

pragmatic2• 14 years ago

This is the problem that you define yourself by your programming language/environment/OS of choice, versus just being a really good problem solver.

See: http://www.kalzumeus.com/2011/10/28/dont-call-yourself-a-pro...

I would say don't call yourself a [Java|Javascript|C|C++] developer.

If your career were a blog post, languages are more like a tag than a title.

Contrast "I Solve Problems" with "I Only Solve Problems with PHP."

untog2• 14 years ago

I don't know, I think that everyone has a "go-to" language, and I don't think that's a reflection on ability to solve problems.

After all, if I'm making a web site there really isn't a choice to make between Python, C#, Ruby, etc.- they're all going to do the job with almost identical ability. Doing it in a different language for the hell of it is definitely a fun learning experience, but if I have a client on the other side I'd rather get it done quickly.

lucisferre6• 14 years ago

Not at all, where do I define myself by my programming language/environment? What I am saying is that language/environment is not a no-effect choice. It has an impact on productivity, efficiency and most importantly the clarity and (for lack of a better term) UX of the code left behind for others.

The problem with your assertion is it assumes that all languages, tools, frameworks and environments are equal to the task.

I am a really good problem solver (at least in my opinion) I just don't want to make the implementation of those solutions harder on myself than it has to be.

cek• 14 years ago

There may be a population of developers who can jump super-easily between tools/languages. But I think the population of developers who, simply because it's what they have spent the most time with, are more productive in one environment is larger.

The OP is basically saying "I'm super comfortable & productive with the MS stack. It's been fun and good. Now I get to focus on something else. The change will be good for me."

Nothing wrong with that.

InclinedPlane3• 14 years ago

That's a nice ideal but it doesn't work very well in practice. It takes an enormous investment to become an expert in any given technology stack, easily on the scale of attaining a college degree. When a restaurant needs a baker, or an executive chef, or a pastry chef they hire specifically, not generically. So does the tech industry. If a company has a rails stack and they need someone up and running quickly it does no good to say "I can do it, just give me a few weeks to get up to speed and a few months to get really good".

Retric• 14 years ago

Plenty of companies go for talent over niche. When you expect the average person to last 5+ years it's dangerous to only higher people that know exactly the stack you work with every day, because it narrows everyone focus and they ignore edge cases where it's really better to use some other tool.

jpastika2• 14 years ago

Two years ago I began developing a large web application and I had to choose a language and stack. Having built applications on .NET and PHP most recently, I knew I could fall back on either and be safe. I decided to investigate RoR and .NET MVC. For whatever reason, RoR felt strange and I knew it would have a steeper learning curve initially, but probably be more efficient to develop with in the long run. On the other hand, .NET MVC felt a bit more familiar, and had many attractive qualities that "appeared" to mimic RoR. I went with .NET MVC. Now 2 years later I find myself spending my day job in .NET MVC and my side projects are all RoR. I found that .NET MVC was a great bridge from regular .NET to RoR. I am frustrated that I didn't pursue RoR harder 2 years ago, but hind sight is 20/20. I am extremely happy to be working on side projects in RoR because honestly it is more fun. Don't get me wrong, RoR isn't all roses, I'm just finding fewer weeds!

jister• 14 years ago

>> You’d probably have to have been living under a rock to have missed all the previous blog posts from others leaving .NET for greener pastures

Well some people have the opposite experience and also have written posts as to why they are moving to .NET.

lucisferre6• 14 years ago

They do? I'd would actually love to read them (I'm sure so would others) so perhaps you would provide some links?

On this note though, I should probably mention I didn't reference those posts to prove there is a deluge of people leaving .NET (in fact I highly doubt that there is), but for context and to demonstrate just how cliche and unoriginal mine was. ;-).

frou_dh• 14 years ago

I have a lot of fondness for C# (version 3+) even though I don't use it any more. VS is a good IDE, too. Windows itself is meh.

Overall, you can do a lot worse.

powertower3• 14 years ago

As a .NET developer that's currently working on a 100,000+ line application that uses all parts of Windows, .NET Framework, and the C# language, I suspect this person is pointing his finger in the wrong direction when he's blaming Microsoft, VS.NET, and C# for "getting in his way".

Best case scenario, is he has been using the wrong tools to solve the problems he works on. But can't admin his own fault.

If anything, what I'm working on now would be downright impossibly complex and infuriating if written in Python (his example of a language and ecosystem).

To me VS.NET is incredible. The .NET framework is incredible. And documentation and information is readily available. But more importantly, the problems I'm solving can't be more easily solved using another stack.

And every time I blame one of the above, a few days later I realize that the real issue was just a stupid mistake I was making myself...

As an example, just the other day I was using a BackgroundWorker (new thread) to do some work outside the UI thread. I needed to do 3 or 4 tasks and decided to re-use the BackgroundWorker for each task (instead of using a new one each time).

Of course problems started showing up. For a while, I was convinced that VS.NET was debugging on the wrong thread, and that there was an issue with re-using BackgroundWorkers in NET. I mean I'm a good programmer, it can't be possibly my fault!

Basically, I forgot to unsubscribe to the BackgroundWorker events. Which caused the previous DoWork attached anonymous functions to run multiple times.

.NET is the way Windows applications are built. VS.NET has no rival on this platform. And this stack is not any weaker because people such as the author leave us. Referencing a few negative blog posts does not prove .NET is dying and that "developers are leaving for greener pastures", which by ALL METRICS is completely not true. If the author wants to think that Python and whatever other choice of IDE will now solve his pain... Then let him eat his cake.

simonw• 14 years ago

"But more importantly, the problems I'm solving can't be more easily solved using another stack."

Can you expand on that a little - what are the particular characteristics of the project that make it better suited for Windows than for a web stack of some sort?

acqq2• 14 years ago

If OP actually cared about the execution speed, he'd be able to have the .NET code running often almost two orders of magnitude faster than Ruby:

http://shootout.alioth.debian.org/u32/benchmark.php?test=all...

If he says that Ruby fits him better I can just conclude that he trades the execution speed for ease of the development, which can be a reasonable trade-off. I'd still like to hear him talking in a year if he actually worked on really comparable problems in .NET and in Ruby.

lloeki• 14 years ago

I think you mixed up something (a detail, really): the author actually mentions Ruby, and Rails. Only a comment is mentioning Python, once.

Craiggybear5• 14 years ago

"But more importantly, the problems I'm solving can't be more easily solved using another stack."

Its a sweeping statement to say the least.

I know the VS IDE and such often prevent you doing dumb things/shooting yourself in the foot and its great!

But are you saying that in the entire development universe there is no solution adequate to any serious problem that didn't come from the MS stack? You'll have never done anything like massively parallel computing or big/complex data sets then. Or AI development.

Air Traffic Control system in .Net, for example? Nah.

.Net is a just a general-purpose tool for writing certain kinds of software. That's all. And it is telling that none of Microsoft's core products (the ones that earn lots of cash) are even remotely going to ever be converted to .Net or managed code.

powertower3• 14 years ago

> Its a sweeping statement to say the least.

No. It's an exact statement based on the particular problem I'm solving.

> I know the VS IDE and such often prevent you doing dumb things/shooting yourself in the foot and its great!

I have no idea what you're talking about unless you think that VS.NET is "visual drag-and-drop programming". I've never used it as such.

> .Net is a just a general-purpose tool for writing certain kinds of software. That's all.

.NET is a higher abstraction of the win32 api with many many additional features. And that's an understatement.

And that "kinds of software" is more or less the entire Windows desktop market.

nahname3• 14 years ago

This is a great example of what is wrong with with dotnet. Someone who has been doing their best to improve the situation and finally giving up, after years of effort is dismissed by some random .net programmer as, "...pointing his finger in the wrong direction" or "using the wrong tools to solve the problems he works on".

C# is an incredible language and VS w/ R# is a pleasure to work with. I have been working in this stack for over 6 years, so it is fair to say I have enough experience to know what I am talking about with regards to being a .NET developer.

That said, .NET, as a development platform, is a couple of diamonds covered by tons of shit and surrounded by people trying to convince everyone else their shovel has all the goodies. Microsoft's shovel comes up empty more often than not and each year sees fewer people sifting through it all to help guide those without the time or taste for it. The biggest killer of .NET is that the majority of the community seems content to keep taking spoonfuls from the MS shovel lying to themselves about it's content.

powertower3• 14 years ago

> Someone who has been doing their best to improve the situation and finally giving up,

What I see is a random blogger makes generalized statements based on lack of experience.

> so it is fair to say I have enough experience to know what I am talking about with regards to being a .NET developer.

Your experience counts, just not mine! And you also know what you're talking about!

> That said, .NET, as a development platform, is a couple of diamonds covered by tons of shit and surrounded by people trying to convince everyone else their shovel has all the goodies.

You seem to have a lot of anger.

Thanks for trying .NET.

Have a nice day.

P.S., more than likely the blog author used VS.NET in a "visual" capacity (drag-and-drop component building).

macca321• 14 years ago

I love c# to bits.

bediger2• 14 years ago

I'm not a .NET person. Heck, I'm not even a Windows person. I found this sentence interesting:

Things like the Microsoft "professional engineer" who advises you at your invitation, and then sends e-mails behind your back to executives to inform them of his concern about the "business risks" of non-Microsoft technology choices.

That's really weird. Who finances these commissars? I mean, I've seen this sort of thing take place, but only when a two-letter consultancy was gunning to take over some director's entire department. What's in it for the commissar?

hkarthik2• 14 years ago

In the .NET ecosystem, there's a number of individuals that enhance their own self-promotion by hitching their wagon completely to the Microsoft train. They present themselves as "experts" and justify high hourly rates by presenting their Microsoft sponsored credentials.

Often such folks have little in the way of open source contributions, commercial products, or shipped code that they can point to. But they've probably spoken at a number of events promoting "The Microsoft Way" and have likely been awarded a Microsoft MVP award as a result of those efforts.

In general, they get by simply by advocating the Microsoft toolchain, and moving on from consulting engagement to engagement just before they're exposed. Or they focus their consulting services on large corporate IT where even their meddling makes little difference in the grand slow scheme of things.

Craiggybear5• 14 years ago

See this all the time. Its astounding what some of these people get away with.

hello_moto8• 14 years ago

This is how most mid-size traditional consulting companies work. You can switch the word Microsoft to IBM or Oracle or something else.

This is how you get referrals. Like it or not, it's business.

r0bbbo• 14 years ago

I've been developing with .NET for seven years now and I've worked with many talented .NET developers, none of whom have been dogmatic about any Microsoft technology. All have been well-versed in open-source alternatives, and the industries I've worked across: financial, media and retail, have never queried any decision to choose these over Microsoft-owned technologies when presented with sound argument. Maybe I've just been lucky.

baggachipz• 14 years ago

"It seems as though the whole philosophy of .NET centres on catering to the novice... .NET, and specifically C#, both coddles you and then scolds you at every turn."

Perfect summary and exactly how I feel about .NET.

munificent• 14 years ago

I'm trying to figure out how a language which features reified generics, covariance and contravariance, lambdas, expressions-as-data, type inference, both static and dynamic types, reflection, and anonymous types could be considered by anyone as "catering to novices" or "coddling" you. Say what you want about MS, but C# is an incredibly powerful and expressive language.

pdwetz• 14 years ago

The image in the link sums it up ("...all without writing a single line of code!", which I've heard personally in Microsoft events). It's not that the languages or the framework lack advanced features, it's that Microsoft/MVP's constantly tote the "beginner" features. I find C# to be very fun to code in... so long as you avoid anything that the tool will do (or only the tool can do) for you.

radicalbyte3• 14 years ago

Funny to see this considering my opinion is pretty much a polar opposite to Chris'.

In the last couple of years C# has gotten better than ever. LINQ, Lambdas & Generics combined with the IDE's autocomplete and refactorings have made the language really nice for power devs.

The next release will include a Compiler as a Service which could be a game changer if it's embraced by the community and if it's not borked by Microsoft.

A good rule of thumb for .Net is that anything from Microsoft which is built around a tool should be avoided like the plague. For example Entity Framework and WPF are horrible tool-bound monsters. They don't play well with version control, don't play well with clean coding (POCOs) and almost feel designed to sell other tools (SQL Server / Expression Blend).

Entity Framework is especially bad. It combines terrible performance, terrible scaling (it has terrible support for large schemas) and until recently didn't even support "code first" development.

Thankfully, like other dinosaurs that kind of thing is going the way of VB6.

To add a bit of context: I have a pretty broad background - been coding for 21 years (started at 10) and have experience implementing something significant in: C64 (BASIC/6510asm), Pascal/Delphi, VB, Java, PHP/HTML/JS, TSQL/SQL, C# and ActionScript/Flex. I've dabbled with Ruby and the beautiful Python.

I abandoned dynamically typed languages for serious projects (those expected to work for > 5 years) because of the poor refactoring support and the dominance of style over substance in the community. I work in the Enterprise, and there software maintenance quickly dominates the cost of projects making the big two static languages a better choice.

I still, of course, turn to dynamic language when they're the best solution to the problem. For example for situations where speed of development dominates returns (think opportunity cost) or where a language is deeply embedded in a specific community (Python and NLP).

hello_moto8• 14 years ago

Many geeks/hackers don't understand or won't accept the fact that you just mentioned regarding maintenance and Enterprise.

Craiggybear5• 14 years ago

Well, I don't ... and it isn't just me who thinks claims made about the "enterprise" are pure marketing BS.

stream_fusion• 14 years ago

The idea of attempting to refactor a 100k+ loc codebase, without static typing and a compiler that can identify issues at compile-time versus runtime is equivalent to asking to be punished. If you must, consider that the role of a type-checking compiler is simply to perform a first round of automatic unit-tests, tests that are conveniently available after providing some typing annotations. To escape static typing - if there is a demonstratable and exceptional need (loose coupling), simply wrap the required events up as objects and switch and downcast on them with enums or use a visitor pattern.

Unfortunately associating dynamic languages like ruby, python and javascipt with some narrative of hacker agility and contrasting against a clumsy slow-moving 'enterprise' culture is confounding the issues. This is not to say that there aren't plenty of vendors/consultants selling FUD and over-hyped and over-complicated 'solutions' in 'enterprise' but it's a non-technical issue.

rbanffy9• 14 years ago

Maybe because it's simply false.

Static typing is not a pre requisite for quality code. Quality developers is. If you have your codebase maintained properly, maintenance is easy and cheap.

SiVal• 14 years ago

I remember the joy of saying goodbye to the limits of BASIC when I switched to C. Ah, the power, the control....

After a while, I was sick of debugging memory and having to rely on "libraries" just to do anything useful with strings, and it was such a relief to discover Perl. Talk about power! I was suddenly creating little utility programs for everything. It occurred to me that I could have been writing these utilities in C all along but I never did because the time to write and debug them was more than the time they would have saved. What a joy to discover Perl (which then led into learning the Unix command line and its utilities.)

But after a while, I noticed how often I still had to look up the "clever" syntax of Perl. There were so many other ways to do things that I couldn't read other people's Perl without a reference book beside me and, heaven help me, sometimes I couldn't even read my own. That had never happened in C, But I wanted to create commercial GUI apps. Perl's answer? Use Tk? Yeah, right.

So, I switched to C++ for GUI apps, and what a treat to have that kind of power compared to Perl. But then I rediscovered memory debugging, what it's like to not have a string datatype, and I learned that the usefulness of OOP was offset by all the ridiculous little gotchas that meant you always had irreproducible bugs that you hadn't yet discovered.

What a relief when Java came out. Almost all the power of C++, plus built-in strings, arrays, even Unicode, but without most of the hidden gotchas. I could concentrate on the demands of the problem instead of the demands of C++. Like lots of programmers, I found Java much more fun than C++.

But of course there were things I missed--structs, enums, regular expressions, GUI apps that looked native--and every time I complained to Sun reps in a meeting, they would simply explain to me that they knew more about programming languages than I did, and they knew that I didn't really need these things. They held that position ("No, trust us, you don't really want that") for years.

But the Microsoft reps were always EXTREMELY interested in anything we wanted from Java but that Sun wouldn't give us. "What do you wish Java had and how would you use it?" They took lots of notes. Superb marketing.

When C# was released, it was with great relief that I finally got the language, native GUI app builder, and other things I'd been longing for in Java for so long.

Building GUI apps with C# is still a joy, but I'm always frustrated at being limited to Windows. I use Macs and Linux boxes, too, and Mono has never quite been what I had hoped for. I need to do a lot of web programming, cross-platform number crunching, and all sorts of things. And having to (repeatedly) buy all of those Microsoft tools and be a "registered developer" and all that nonsense, phooey!

Thank goodness, I found Python. Free, available on every platform, great built-ins AND great libraries.... Like Perl, but with a syntax I remember without looking things up. I can read other people's code without a reference.

But I wish it had the flexibility and macros of Lisp, the power I've found in functional programming, the easy GUI creator of C#, the speed of C... and a pony.

I understand the OP's feeling of relief at leaving annoyances behind. Believe me, I do. Every system I've used has had problems I'm glad to rid of and features I still miss. But that's what you get when you change a relationship, move to a new house, sell your car, get a new job. And, with programming languages, you can go back when you need to.

It's often good to move on, but it doesn't mean what you left behind was bad. Sometimes you just need different problems.

pnathan• 14 years ago

What's your take on the use for Haskell in the enterprise for large code bases?

radicalbyte3• 14 years ago

It depends on what you're building. That's why it's good to know a broad range of languages : you can pick and choose the best options from the general purpose languages, or use your knowledge to build your own simple DSL..

When appropriate : language/framework choice depends on more than just technical factors...

hello_moto8• 14 years ago

There are probably 2 reasons why I would look at .NET and one of them is not pure .NET/Windows anyway.

1) Consulting/Contracting gigs

2) Mono for cross-platform GUI development

Craiggybear5• 14 years ago

I no longer do .Net development and leaving it all behind was a breath of fresh air. It was ridiculous.

I find it monstrously overblown and while its proponents/fans call it elegant I think its a horrible inelegant mess. Great if all you do is Windows, no doubt.

Plus I don't trust Microsoft on Mono (which at one time I thought was a neat idea) and I don't trust them not to dump their existing .Net devs like they did with VB6 sometime down the line and without warning as soon as they and their marketing department decide the next shiny-shiny programming paradigm has arrived. There are plenty of rumours about this and I frankly don't discount any of them as being too far-fetched.

eropple• 14 years ago

> I don't trust Microsoft on Mono

The FUD on this issue has been tirelessly debunked. Microsoft would have to contravene its own covenants and agreements in order to do this.

There are reasons to dislike Mono. This is not a legitimate one.

funkah• 14 years ago

I have worked pretty much my whole career in .NET, and I think it's pretty good in terms of actual coding and development. It has gotten better by leaps and bounds in recent years. .NET and C# aren't the problem, the insanity of the Windows stack is the problem. So many stupid little things unrelated to your code can go wrong, the toolchain is paltry, and deployment is still a mess.

If you're actually using drag-and-drop you probably already lost.

InclinedPlane3• 14 years ago

C# is an awesome systems language, hampered primarily by official support being limited to windows systems. But a lot of other technologies swirling around the .net stack are horrific. EF, workflow/xaml, wpf, and even the build infrastructure such as team foundation and msbuild are not a pleasure to work with and in many cases generally inferior to free open source alternatives.

Worse yet, sometimes you get the feeling that building expertise in all these tools is limiting because it has little commonality outside the windows bubble. Working on improving IIS performance won't help you much in a wider world were apache and nginx expertise is more useful, for example.

pmarsh• 14 years ago

In the end it all boils down to use the best tool for you for the job you're working on.

That aside, going from Rails to .NET MVC has been a lesson in patience. While I am glad to have skipped Webforms, there is still something about .NET MVC that weighs on new ideas.

It's just easier to get up and running with a Rails stack and get your idea out there.

But that's just me, maybe for you it's Python, or C or Assembly. Whatever it is you work best in that's what you use.

Posts like this can help a community identify weak points though so I'm always glad to see them.

dazbradbury• 14 years ago

I'm using .Net (MVC3) for my current web startup. I thought about python, I thought about RoR, I thought about Java, but I decided on .Net.

Why?

I knew C# well at the time, maybe not the best out of the languages I know, but well enough to hit the ground running. And I knew with MVC3, I would be running in no time. Visual Studio is an awesome environment IF you have a fast PC. I have a fast PC. LINQ, and LINQ to SQL, is incredibly powerful. I can drastically alter my SQL DB, and have my ORM code auto-generated immediately.

Out of the box, .Net takes care of a lot of the detail. I can optimise this detail later if I need to (I hope).

With the aim of this code being maintainable, and having hated maintaining a large python code-base before, I wanted to use a statically typed language.

Importantly, I knew .Net was going to be scalable when I needed it be (stackoverflow.com as an example).

How is it going?

Very well. But I've not launched yet. I have no regrets, and think C# is an amazing language to work with.

I would generally consider myself language agnostic, so whilst the decision was hard, I was confident it wouldn't matter too much in the end. Hopefully that will remain the case, but you never know what's around the corner...!

plasma• 14 years ago

My biggest pains with .Net C# are:

1) Not runnable properly on Linux (I always have trouble with mono - maybe its just me)

2) Compilation and app restart time etc are annoying when wanting to develop rapidly

LINQ and the syntax of the language, VS etc are all awsome though.

brosephius• 14 years ago

Visual Studio compilation times are ridiculously fast for me, are you talking about Mono/Linux in point #2 also?

grout• 14 years ago

sigh Scientists stand on the shoulders of giants; programmers stand on each others' feet.

adamc• 14 years ago

This reminds me a lot of posts I used to see on Javablogs 5-6 years ago. Not sure what that means, but I don't think it's the language so much as where people _are_ with the language. In 2005-2006, there were a lot of folks who'd spent almost a decade with Java. They were good at it, but they were also getting bored and looking for new horizons, and Ruby and Python were available. Beta versions of .Net rolled out in 2000, so we might have the same kind of phenomenon.

None of which is to say other languages might not be better. But being better has never been enough, on its own. If it were, C++ might never have gotten a start. Language popularity depends a lot on history. But boredom/dissatisfaction with a dominant language can help give a new language a chance.

nahname3• 14 years ago

I think a big part of it is also the dead weight that accumulates with older technologies. Sometimes it is a person just making a decision for the stability of their household or because they've been at it so long it is all they know. Whatever the cause, as a technology (particularly a language) ages, more and more people that are change adverse remain and those (many times the best and brightest) move on. Not really surprising, but a bit unfortunate for those who remain.

ilaksh2• 14 years ago

To me its about trends as much as anything. I noticed a few years ago that the kids on reddit were not interested in .NET but were interested in JavaScript etc.

So, honestly one of the main reasons I got out of .NET was because it seemed like it wasn't as cool as I thought it was anymore.

Another reason, although this is probably a secondary rationalization, is that open source isn't really that big in .NET, and open source seemed important (and cool).

Which isn't to say that there aren't lots of rational reasons to get out of Microsoft development, but I just think that we should acknowledge that people don't usually do things for rational reasons. They mostly do what other people seem to think they should do.

Anyway, I don't see anything wrong with drag-and-drop components or intellisense or even compile time checks. That stuff is really helpful. I am working on composable drag-and-drop widgets for JavaScript/CoffeeScript web applications. And I think that less code is better, and if you can accomplish the same thing with a GUI designer, drag and drop and some property editing, then that is better than writing source code to do it. Its better engineering.

IDEs that are slow are not great, of course. The biggest issues for me are that most everything is closed source and generally the language C# is much more verbose compared to CoffeeScript or JavaScript. Also your software will only run on Windows desktops and not over the web.

jmcqk62• 14 years ago

I'm trying to understand your last few sentences. Microsoft has open sourced huge amounts of code in the last four years or so. The entire MVC framework is open source, for example. Nuget (another open source project, but built with the community) is really driving the adoption of many open source projects in the larger .net world. You have companies like telerik (huge .net shop) releasing some of their own software open source now.

Microsoft even redistributes jquery. The culture (at least in the web side of .net) has really changed in the last few years.

Which brings me to your last sentence. Any software built with .NET will not run over the web? Where are you getting that from? I've been programming .NET for 8 years now, and I've only programmed stuff that runs over the web.

ilaksh2• 14 years ago

Sorry that last part was a mis-stated. A lot of .NET is Windows desktop programming.

A lot of the "web" stuff is XBAP or whatever which is basically desktop packaged to go in IE.

Sure there is plenty of ASP.NET development going on, and that is over the web.

But come on, you can't say that most .NET software is not closed source. Sure, some of it is being 'opened up', but for the most part, ASP.NET and C# libraries and components are not open source. Especially when you compare the ratios to other platforms.

sakopov• 14 years ago

I too have second thoughts about .NET. I absolutely love C#. I've worked in just about any language & dev stack out there and, to me, nothing comes close to the immense power of C#. My biggest gripes with .NET is tooling and deployments. I do agree that sometimes you wait for ages for tools that are already available in other development stacks (think EF or Team Foundation). Deploying on .NET is an absolutely atrocious experience. Dealing with MSBuild, XAML workflows and WebDeploy is just a royal pain in the butt. On the other hand, I do have to say that when you have a rock-solid group of engineers working on a complex .NET solution, the architectural patterns are much easier to implement and bring new people into than other stacks I'd worked on. Everything just looks cleaner, plus you have some pretty solid frameworks you can tap into such as MVC for web, LINQ for powerful querying, WCF for service-oriented needs, WPF for beautiful desktop apps. Moving from all of this is certainly pretty tough. But I sometimes feel the need to embrace the cool stuff that's happening with the speed of light in other stacks. It's just too big to disregard.

.NET: So long and thanks for all the fish

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