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Comment by deno | Hacker News Reader

Its ecosystem isn’t. C# will never get accepted as an open source product. It only has open source code, it’s not actually ‘open-source.’ Compare it with Typescript, which—despite originating from Microsoft—is a truly open project, and getting love left and right.

C# might be better than Java/JVM, but it’s not better enough. The culture/ecosystem barrier is so high that C# would have to be miles ahead, technically superior in every way, to overcome it. I do hate the “worse is better” adage, but there’s no mistaking it, it applies here.

It’s just too little, too late.

But Typescript is awesome, keep it up.

Ironically, Google’s competitor (Closure Compiler) has actually been unsuccessful for similar reasons. To this date its main repo is just a clone of the internal master. For whatever reason they’ve never attempted to rebase on open-source release.

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What do you mean by it not being open source? The core CLR is MIT licensed and the compiler is Apache licensed.

This sounds like fud to me.

I have no issue with the license.

So it's maintained in the open on GitHub, it's technically open source in terms of licensing. Yet you claim it's not really open source. Care to clarify?

It’s technically open-source, that’s the point. There’s more to open-source than license. Sorry but there’s no way for me to clarify without just repeating my original comment.

Your original comments mostly contained your personal opinions, not actual facts. The fact is that it is open source and you are FUDing.

> Your original comments mostly contained your personal opinions

I never tried to pass it as anything else.

There’s more to open-source than license.

Such as? You seem to have a mental model of things that make a project objectively open source, that don't include the license. I'd be curious what those things are.

I really don’t, it’s more of a feeling. With an open-source release like .NET it seems more like better documentation. In fact that was the case for early commercial Unixes—you needed the source code to actually use the system, but it wasn’t open-source.

Open-source as-documentation (for lack of better term) is still useful. It makes bug fixing a whole lot easier, for one thing. But it’s not quite the same as open-source ecosystem. For that you need to have a diverse set of actors, sharing the same goal. That’s what I think successful open-source project makes. You need to accept the fact that the project is not just yours. Something like that.

Of course Microsoft could do all those things. Who knows, it they’re determined enough they might turn it around. The problem here is like I said Java is just good enough. No one really cares, except people that could use some better documentation, that have been already invested in the ecosystem. That’s why open-sourcing is still valuable, but also why they’ll never gain any adoption of the kind they’d need.

Sorry if that sounds like rambling, it’s sort of late.

do you more mean like, the decisions, and planned changes, etc, aren't open? (along with being tied to the whims of the CEO and the company's money?)

They might be open, but there’s democracy and then there’s democracy. See for example recent MSBuild incident (but don’t try to argue about it it’s just an example).

As I said, it’s a feeling. The feeling is it’s Microsoft’s project, everyone else is along for a ride. And that’s fine, but it’s something different. Let’s just not pretend technical merits drive adoption, that’s rarely true.

> They might be open, but there’s democracy and then there’s democracy. See for example recent MSBuild incident (but don’t try to argue about it it’s just an example).

> As I said, it’s a feeling. The feeling is it’s Microsoft’s project, everyone else is along for a ride. And that’s fine, but it’s something different. Let’s just not pretend technical merits drive adoption, that’s rarely true.

Uhm. So many free software projects work like that. A company creates something, releases it as free software. Yes, people contribute (and that's awesome by the way) but in general all of the engineering talent works at the company because they wrote it in the first place (and they hire contributors). At SUSE this is how YaST, zypper, spacewalk, et al development works (with significant contributions from the openSUSE community, but we have teams of people working on those projects so our contributions are more of a concentrated effort). There's nothing new or different about this model of free software development (Sun did the same thing with OpenSolaris and Joyent does the same thing with SmartOS). Yes, GNU and Linux follow the hobbyist model but that's not how all projects work.

I was too harsh with the ‘open-source as-documentation’ term.

My point is this is just not enough to compete with JVM, which is already a vibrant open-source ecosystem.

by that definition, it'd be hard to call Python open source.

It is open source in every sense. The development is open, they accept patches/contributions etc.

.net is far more of a true open source framework than android is.

> It’s technically open-source, that’s the point. There’s more to open-source than license. Sorry but there’s no way for me to clarify without just repeating my original comment.

It's free software, and in that sense the license is the only thing that really matters. However, if you're discussing open collaboration styles then that's a whole different discussion. Either your project is free software or it isn't. Whether it has a diverse and open development community is a separate problem, and doesn't fall under "is this project [free software]".

i have a hard time with this argument. on one hand what you say is true: C# is a strictly smaller community than java. OTOH that's true of pretty much any language, and yet python, ruby, elixir, swift, golang, etc. communities are healthy and vibrant.

if what you really mean is 'java people won't switch to C# anyway', then i agree, but C# isn't a really a language for them. it's a language for people who don't like and/or aren't forced to use java by their employers.

People who aren’t forced to use Java will choose Scala or other JVM langs, like Kotlin, Ceylon (a favorite of mine) or even Clojure.

C# the language is not exactly that exciting. I get it, it looks attractive next to Java, but it’s still a verbose, corporate-first, sort of thing. If anything, F# is much more competitive. Too bad it’s on CLR.

[disclaimer, also MS employee].

This has already devolved into opinion territory but I don't think you're giving C# enough credit.

I picked up F# relatively early in it's lifetime (2006ish?), back then there were many language features in F# that you just couldn't do in C#. The gap closed a lot when C# got LINQ, generics, and lambda/first-class functions (these are relatively old language features by now).

If I want to write in an quasi-functional-programming language style I can do it without having the language get in my way. I certainly wouldn't call it a "verbose, corporate-first" language, although the fact that it can be used for that is a bonus.

Don’t forget Rx. Not exactly language feature, but certainly a great contribution to come out of C#/.NET. And who knows if it would have happened without LINQ.

I like the language. Just not enough to use it over JVM. And I think most people feel the same way.

As if C# were any less driven by PHB-dictated internal enterprise mandates than Java is.

That is not quite true.

Many of us doing enterprise consulting do jump between Java and .NET projects all the time.

Sometimes even doing mixed projects, like the UI in .NET and the backend in Java.

i'll grant you that after a very brief consideration

> UI in .NET and the backend in Java.

makes a lot of sense.

The problem with native desktop Java applications that although Swing is quite powerful, it requires developers to go through books like "Filthy Rich Clients"[0] to really take advantage of it. Which very few do.

To this day I still meet developers that aren't aware how to change the default L&F to native widgets, for example.

Whereas Windows Forms and WPF already provide a much easier out of the box experience, and have tooling like Blend available.

I am curious what the JavaFX sessions at JavaONE will cover.

[0] http://filthyrichclients.org/

That's not what Worse Is Better means. Did you read the Gabriel paper?

/nitpick

I got it from Unix’s haters handbook.

Well, you clearly didn't get the full definition. Go read Lisp: The Good News, The Bad News, And How To Win Big

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