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Comment by treehau5 | Hacker News Reader

For the world of me, the C# folk keep parroting about how much "better" C# is than Java, and having worked _extensively_ in both, I can't seem to see it, especially with Java 8. Maybe if you said C# is "so much better than Java" in the days of Java 6 I would agree.

I also hear the "faster" argument, but have yet to see any meaningful benchmarks proving this. In fact I see more showing the opposite, but maybe I am not looking hard enough?

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Honestly for me the main difference are the IDEs. I started with Eclipse and the jump to IntelliJ was huge/great. But using Visual Studio was always a better experience.

Your point about the difference between the languages is definitely true re: Java 6. Java stagnated for a few years there while C# was improving with things I'd actually use. Java 8 is definitely an improvement and ultimately I think it would boil down to ease of use and familiarity when comparing them.

One thing I don't miss about java is server configuration. At the same time, I'm definitely relying on IIS doing things behind the scenes I probably don't know about.

IntelliJ now, at least in my opinion, is unmatched. Intellij feels more like a lightweight text editor now like a Sublime, but all the power of an IDE, whereas Visual Studio very much feels like a kitchen sink IDE. Intellij sometimes gets bogged down when it reindexes your files (which you can optimize by excluding certain folder), but Visual Studio sometimes brings my entire system to a screeching halt while I wait for it to do whatever it is it is doing.

Also, I know this is nitpicky, but having to press CTRL+K, CTRL+C, then CTRL+K,CTRL+U to comment/uncomment just feels obscene to me. I understand you can modify the shortcuts, and I am being petty, but CTRL or CMD+/ toggle comments off/on just feels much better, and that's probably one of the most used ones for me which is why I am probably nitpicking about it.

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