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Comment by nerdywordy | Hacker News Reader

React Native is gaining a lot of traction for cross-platform mobile development. My company has started to transition to RN over Xamarin for our enterprise app development.

Functional languages have begun to gain popularity and coverage as well.

On the frontend Elm is excellent. On the backend Elixir and the web framework Phoenix offer top notch developer experiences.

If you have experience in the dot net world... Dot Net Core is shaping up to be a revolutionary rewrite of the dot net ecosystem. It's fast and lean, as well as cross-platform.

If you are into lower level languages, Rust & Go have picked up a ton of steam in the past few years. Until recently they have been stuck in the systems level programming niche, but Go especially is beginning to take hold for API and more "front side of the backend" development.

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.Net core seems really cool, but I don't see it getting anywhere for a while. Most of the enterprise is still using .Net standard. It is near to impossible for me to get a job working on an ASP.Net Core codebase right now, because everyone seems to still be using .Net standard.

Fair point. For enterprise the transition will likely take 3-5 years minimum before Dot Net Core really catches hold.

But for startups or faster moving enterprise shops, Dot Net Core does present a more exciting (and flexible) ecosystem.

Interesting. What is preventing them from upgrading? I ask because I was thinking of picking up .NET Core as a stepping stone to one day transitioning to a Microsoft-based skillset (I'm a Ruby dev). If it's proving to be unpopular within the .NET community then I may reconsider.

Enterprises generally don't upgrade anything unless someone convinces them it's necessary. They don't want to follow the bleeding edge of tech, they want to follow the most stable/secure tech with the largest pools of talented workers. Hence the popularity of Java and .NET at the enterprise level.

Picking up .NET core would make a great start to transitioning to a Microsoft-based skill set. That's generally the way those skills are gained - by starting with the latest available to the platform and working backwards as necessary. I started down the path with .NET 4.5 and don't think I've had but a small handful of opportunities to utilize the features in it because most of the servers I work with have .NET 4 as the latest version.

Most enterprise's on .NET are windows shops. There is very little incentive in my opinion to run .NET core when you're a windows shop as it doesn't provide any real-world benefits/features yet that are beyond what you get from the full .NET framework. .NET Core's story as it stands is making .NET properly cross-platform. If you don't need cross-platform at the moment you don't net .NET core in my opinion.

I wouldn't say it's unpopular, just not ready yet. Most .Net development is for corporations and they tend to be conservative about new technologies.

I think the reason that migration isn't happening faster is because of the dependencies a project may have that don't yet support .net core. That one PDF or SAML library that's on full .net only prevents the move.

Assuming that by ".Net standard" you mean the traditional .NET Framework, the irony in this comment is awesome.

.NET Standard is the newest of the new.

https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/dotnet/2016/09/26/introduci...

The terminology is getting hard to follow :)

Whoops! Yeah, all this is sorta making me put off getting into the Microsoft Stack.

>React Native

now also NativeScript and up and coming Weex (React Native for Vue, built by alibaba)

I'm excited to check out Weex... but I find NativeScript to be terribly buggy and slow compared to React Native. Have you had a positive experience with NativeScript?

I do see a surge of interest for Elixir but I don't see the same for Elm. Where do you see it gaining traction?

Mind if I ask why you chose RN over Xamarin? I'm currently going a similar decision and would love to hear your thought process.

Iteration speed is the main reason. Our devs can develop, test, and push tweaks absurdly fast with RN. Most of our applications are CRUD apps shooting the data to web.

There's nothing wrong with Xamarin. We have a few apps still maintained in Xamarin. But I find developing UIs and even the general data flow to be better in RN. Perhaps I just prefer JSX and the Redux pattern.

I find that Xamarin is still better documented and it's easier to find help than with RN. But we tend to live on the bleeding edge a bit.

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