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Comment by lwansbrough | Hacker News Reader

More Silicon Valley startups need to get on board with .NET. Yeah, I know it's strongly typed and doesn't abuse white space, but you're missing A LOT of potential customers when you skip out on .NET. Seems like a really poor business decision to ignore it simply because there isn't someone on your team who has built a compiler for it in their spare time.

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Eh, this seems like an example where Stripe did pretty well for itself by leaving this part of the market for last.

PG wrote some essays about it: startups better spend their seed/series money on other things than software licenses.

Then the unthinkable happened: after PG left, HN got MSFT PR-heavy in spring 2015. People should learn from the history.

> startups better spend their seed/series money on other things than software licenses

Like say, paying developers to maintain their SDK in Closure?

I just wanted to chime in on this. IMO It will happen more often now, but .NET had/has a higher cost to entry (higher than say, ruby/py/java) which is the real reason why SV startups haven't been on board.

It is arguably also a bad business decision to shell out $$ for a language that isn't used at your company.

> .NET had/has a higher cost to entry

> It is arguably also a bad business decision to shell out $$ for a language that isn't used at your company.

What cost(s) are you thinking of here? .NET doesn't cost anything (monetarily). Some of the tools cost money but you can also get by in the .NET world with a command-prompt and text editor (I did as a hobbyist for quite some time).

I might be misunderstanding your statements, but it's also possible that you're misunderstanding .NET, I'm just trying to clarify which one it :)

One needs to invest $$ because you pay money for the developers time to create software

> but .NET had/has a higher cost to entry (higher than say, ruby/py/java)

as opposed to Java developers who are hmm...free ?

For a long time many third party components were commercial. A lot more than in the Ruby, Python or Java ecosystems, for example.

Things are slowly moving towards Open Source and cross platform, but .NET is far behind Java at this moment. It is moving fast, though.

I've been doing .NET development since 2006 and have never had to buy commercial components. Every time I have needed something there has been free/open source stuff. I'm guessing it depends on what type of software you are working on?

For a long time there was no free option to validate json schema with the latest norm.

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