- C# smells corporate, being used in many large scale business application.
- C# is developed by Microsoft, a billion dollar company itself
- The .NET platform is only partial open source
So facts don't matter much, it's about smell :)
The .NET platform is now completely open source[2]. The compiler (Roslyn), tooling (cli), the runtime (coreclr), and the standard library (corefx) are all listed there, all under the Apache 2.0 license.
What's not open source?
[1] https://github.com/dotnet/csharplang [2] https://github.com/dotnet/
Or would you prefer committee ownership like JavaScript (EcmaScript)? Maybe something like http://www.ecma-international.org/publications/standards/Ecm...?
Besides that though, C# is much nicer than Java and fills a similar niche.
It's my preferred language, especially now it is getting functional constructs. It's basically a more advanced, concise and flexible version of Java. Only with value types (fast algorithms).
As others have said the ecosystem is different, it's better for games (Unity) but horrible for NLP (Lucene.net is a museaum piece and NHibernate isn't great).
I write just as much TypeScript/JavaScript nowadays and keep my Java/Python up to date. I really want to add a functional language to replace Python (the 2/3 divide is tiring) but don't have the time (thanks to having two young kids and a wife who also works full time).
https://referencesource.microsoft.com/ https://github.com/Microsoft/referencesource
It's under a proper Open Source license now too (the MIT license).
That's not of much worth if the design process remains firmly in corporate hands.
Microsoft is currently, slowly, opening the process to the community, but even then I expect corporate will continue driving most of the roadmap and keep veto on everything, very much like Swift — which is much much much further on that track than C# is, Microsoft having only created a C# design/evolutions mailing list and repository literally days ago, the ML was created on January 30th[0] and the repository was created and announced on February 1[1], the "community input" doesn't actually exit yet.
[0] https://lists.dot.net/pipermail/csharplang/2017-January/thre...
[1] https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/dotnet/2017/02/01/the-net-l...
[1]https://lists.dot.net/pipermail/csharplang/2017-February/thr...
That link was in support of my claim of the ML having been created on January 30, nothing else.
And people posting stuff on a mailing list means nothing if it doesn't actually impact the language, which we can't judge yet because the opening isn't even a week old yet.
As for the "lot more activity", it's mostly two blokes (Justin Spindler and Tanner Gooding) posting their old roslyn issues back to the ML. If you're looking for disingenuous may I suggest a mirror?
Also why is it bad the language is developed by a billion dollar company? It means the language tooling is second to none, as well as having fully document libraries which can do everything, and are kept up to date.