Nowadays it's my favourite language I write in - it has _excellent_ tooling, especially JetBrains Rider IDE. The open-source library ecosystem might not be as broad as NodeJS or Ruby, but it's high quality and growing all the time.
For most the late 80s-early 2000s, I was not a huge fan of Microsoft mostly because of their predatory practices and the shoddy quality of their software. But they had a few products that I thought were legitimately good, and Visual Studio (and the C# language) was one of them. Part of my admiration of it was partly because of Anders Heijlsberg, its architect.
I started my programming life with Borland tools (Turbo Pascal), and then later Delphi. Anders architected all of these tools. They are long in the tooth now but at the time, these tools were fairly well regarded because they reflected flair and good taste. When Anders created C#, I managed to look at it without being clouded by my Microsoft prejudice, because I knew who was behind it.
I started writing C# code a couple of years ago when I started working for a large enterprise. Even as a Linux/UNIX guy, I am able to say that C# is a truly elegant language that is fun to work with, and I would pick it over Java or Scala any day. I don't like its Windows centricity (Windows is still not my favorite platform), but outside of that, it is truly a well-architected language.
Silicon Valley types would do well to put aside their prejudices of the C# language and evaluate it based on its own merits.
Delphi was way ahead of it's time.
PS: Commodore 64 was my first love.
But good java IDEs aren’t free either.
To be fair, you should also mention Anders involvement in the thing that J++ was, and the Sun vs MS settlement.
https://github.com/aspnet/JavaScriptServices
https://dotnetthoughts.net/using-node-services-in-aspnet-cor...