Comment by nkohari | Hacker News Reader

Comment by nkohari | Hacker News Reader

ALT.NET died because a huge number of the people who were involved have left the .NET ecosystem entirely, mostly to Ruby and node.js. (For example, I wrote Ninject, which was a fairly popular OSS .NET project in its day, but I haven't written a line of C# in years.)

Ironically, now that Microsoft is much friendlier to OSS, there are dramatically fewer people interested in working on open source .NET. Don't get me wrong, it's great to see Microsoft doing this stuff. It's just about 7 years too late.

For open source .NET to regain its relevancy, it would require a unique OSS project or framework to be built on .NET and gather meaningful mindshare. To my knowledge, that hasn't happened in years.

I agree on the "about 7 years too late". But you're leaving out an important new development that is making .Net relevant again, namely that the three major cloud computing companies are supporting C# for their "serverless" cloud computing.

How does support for some function services translate to "making .Net relevant again"? In all of the talk I've seen regarding recent changes of .Net Core/Standard, serveless has never come up. Most people are not in the .Net space because of what it can do without the frameworks they are use to using if they re-write their code.

Because there is an audience, and I think that it is growing, for "serverless" server-side platforms feeding SPAs. Apps that outgrow Firebase have somewhere to go with AWS Lambda and Azure Functions.

>Most people are not in the .Net space because of what it can do without the frameworks they are use to using if they re-write their code.

The clearly there's a lot of growth potential in .Net once those people find out what it can do without all that "framework" baggage.

Maybe... but I'm not sure about that. If you want to make the argument that Azure has a good chance to make .NET relevant again, I might buy that, but in terms of developer mindshare it's still nowhere near something like Heroku.

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