I am immediately skeptical of this analysis.
No .NET Framework at all? I know that isn't true since I have browsed Who's Hiring plenty.
Said that If you think I should add something to this blog post (a tag) let me know, I will do that. Also, I'm building stats, page, where everything will be comparable and selectable, from all sources not only Hacker News.
I think the author looked at ~5 years worth 2011-2016.
For comparison, the previous "Who's Hiring" of August 2016[1] had 947 comments. If we only count the top level posts (ignore nested replies), it's probably ~900 job postings. Of those, I counted only 8 posts with the keyword "ASP.NET" and 35 posts with keyword "C#".
Granted, that's only 1 month eyeball observation vs 5 years but it seems to be consistent with my perception of how much (how little?) C#/ASP.NET is used in the startup scene. (In contrast, if you browse Monster.com job listings, you'll see C#/Java posts outnumbering Nodejs/Python because more enterprise companies post openings there.)
If the author didn't specifically look for "ASP.NET", perhaps the "Azure" stats would be a gross proxy for popularity. I doubt many Ruby/Rails, Python/Django, or NodeJS would specifically deploy to Azure. All the trends I see about Azure is that Microsoft is doing a very good job of attracting "enterprise" customers but not the hearts & minds of garage startups.
As another unscientific observation: I can't remember any "Show HN" posts on the front page that used C#/ASP.NET.
This might change as dotnet core gathers steam. Mono was not considered a solid base by most companies, especially when compared to Java, while dotnet core has the QA assurances Microsoft can provide.
Xamarin was also commercial and was quite expensive just 1 year ago.
It would be an interesting experiment to monitor "Who's hiring" 2-3 years from now, I'm betting on .NET climbing quite steadily.
It also might not.
> Mono was not considered a solid base by most companies, especially when compared to Java, while dotnet core has the QA assurances Microsoft can provide.
This is true, but .NET and Windows both had that before: if the QA assurances Microsoft can provide was important to startups, the fact that a third-party reimplementation of .NET wasn't viewed as a solid base wouldn't prevent .NET uptake among startups.
Now, if the only thing holding startups back from .NET was lack of first-class support for non-Windows platforms, .NET core might cure that, but I don't think it is.
I really don't see many reasons why other things would be blockers for startups.
dotnet core is fast, it's cross platform, free and open source, so you can use it with very cheap hosting, C# is quite a nice language and on top of that it's "familiar", programmers can get their head around it very easily, the ecosystem is not that rich for cross platform (yet), but it is evolving rapidly, the apps can be compiled to native code.
I really don't see any major downside to dotnet core, once the ecosystem reaches critical mass, which should happen in ~1-2 years.
If you were going to pick Go or Scala or Erlang or Ruby/Jruby or Python if .NET wasnt an option, I don't think you are going to jump on C# if the reason .NET was excluded are gone -- if you were going to pick Scala, maybe F# is attractive in that case, but it seems to me that for most languages that startups actually seem to choose, it's unlikely that .NET being available changes that choice to one of the .NET languages.
I think that .NET going cross platform will give it some uptick in startup adoption, but I'm skeptical about it being a big one.
This analysis isn't that far off of some of the other trends you'll see from resources such as Gartner. Windows and .Net have taken a beating recently due to the growth in the cloud sector of IT.