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Comment by skellera | Hacker News Reader

Seems like the view here is pretty negative. I feel like most people here haven't worked with Microsoft dev products recently. They're getting better. I guess the crowd here isn't typically in the .NET world.

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I don't care if MS is getting better lately.

The fact it's getting better is obviously a positive thing, but will it stay that way in the future? no one knows.

I like the fact Github is independent of all the big players. I really, really, really hope it stays a neutral ground.

Also, if acquired by MS, I'm not that afraid for github itself. However, what is at risk in my opinion is all the integrations around github. There is a rich and striving ecosystem surrounding github. Tools like appveyor, travis-ci, coverall, readthedocs, codacy are really useful, ease a lot development and are infinitely easier to setup/maintain than a Jenkins box plus a few slaves. What would happen to this ecosystem remains to be seen.

> The fact it's getting better is obviously a positive thing but will it stay that way in the future? no one knows.

This is such a prejudiced statement. It can be said of any company.

That's the point. No one acquires GitHub so no one can eventually corrupt it with partisan "my stuff is better than your stuff" idiocy.

GitHub works because it effectively belongs to "no one" as far as the big players are concerned. Sure they might themselves go bad one day but there is no point in hasting this for some two cents Azure/AWS/GCP mode.

I am not worried about the ecosystem. See VS Code.

If the acquisition goes through, VS Code is probably going to kill Atom, which is my go-to editor for many tasks. VS Code may be better overall, but it's not for me, and I'll have to change my workflow.

I agree. Atom is definitely in danger. They will not give up VS Code and maintaining two "identical" products makes no sense.

Particularly with how they interact on GitHub now, it's quite impressive. I've reported issues for docs.microsoft.com, participated in discussions on Visual Basic development, etc. and while there's still definitely that corporate veil to some degree, they're extremely responsive, they're very active in responding to requests and discussing fixes.

I generally now hope that whatever Microsoft thing I'm dealing with somewhere ends up linking to GitHub, because everyone on the side of the company that's working with GitHub is pretty on point.

Which is what gives me some hope that they could manage this acquisition right: They're already doing GitHub the way GitHub should be done.

Even when it leads from GH to internal email chains, they're really good about keeping those on the GH issue in the loop... often from only parallel issues.

Issue filed in node sql driver... azure tech notices the issue, raises to sql team... sql team dev starts replying and working to resolve... recommends patch to upstream project in github... issue resolved.

Oracle would NEVER do something like that. It was actually very impressive, and that's just my one anecdote, and I've seen many others.

MS buying GitHub will be one of the worse things to happen to the industry in a long time. But should end all discussion that MS has changed.

FB, Google and the other big tech companies that contribute so much will have to go elsewhere and we will have a fragmentation mess.

I swear MS just does not want us to have nice things.

> Seems like the view here is pretty negative.

Well it's not like the reason for being negative is unfounded. MS has a long history of running services into the ground, and their recent 'we love open source' charade brings back strong memories of E3 for many folks.

I have never seen any good .NET code in the wild. A typical story IMO is to come into a workplace where they are trying to dump legacy .NET systems as soon as possible because they are incredibly brittle. .NET seems to be one of the biggest software scams of all time. Great vendor lock-in though. Visual Studio, MS-SQL, LINQ, Entity framework etc... the only solution is to rewrite everything.

I don't know what you're on about. C# is basically a "better Java" so there's no particular reason you can't write good software in it.

That's very subjective. C# has tons of useless keywords that you just know some arrogant dev is going to use because they can, which then no junior can work with. It also has a worse ecosystem for writing server software (while obviously a better ecosystem for writing Windows applications) and is less suitable for cross-platform work.

Can you elaborate on this "keyword" statement? I find the statement very confusing especially when comparing it to C, modern C++, modern Java or any functional "magic" languages.

The second part is true. .NET does not share the same wide ecosystem as Java.

It is subjective, but things like genetics and reflection I think are better in C#. I am not sure which keywords you think are "useless." Either way though, they're quite similar. There is no innate quality about C# where the code has to be terrible and the only hope is a total rewrite in something else.

> is less suitable for cross-platform work

I have hands-on experience with Unity3D and .NET Core 2. Both are cross-platform and worked relatively well. I’ve built MacOS, iOS, Android software with Unity, and Linux software with .NET Core.

I’ve heard Xamarin is also good for mobiles but haven’t personally used it.

I would say StackOverflow is a pretty good example

Stack Overflow works pretty well.

But perhaps not without some pain for those involved making it: https://blog.codinghorror.com/why-ruby/

I've done legacy work in both and I'd never choose Ruby over C#. It might be a little faster to write the code the first time around, but maintaining a big legacy project stinks.

Also, none of Atwood's reasons is "I don't like working in C#." And several of the concerns in this post are obsolete.

Actually, I find Ruby code much easier to look at than most Java / C# UglyCapsRunOn word-soup. YMMV.

Well who cares about that, really. I'm not talking about how pretty the code is; I'm talking about the ease of maintaining it. Ruby code frequently requires digging through the method and methods it calls to figure out the expected input.

I think that's the point. I'm personally worried Microsoft may have a very narrow view of what GitHub is. A lot of tech hosted there doesn't even run on Windows, or isn't even related to software. (legal, political, docs, guides, etc.)

Since the Core era, not all .NET applications are built for Windows either.

Considering you bring up the second part, it makes me wonder if maybe outside of the obvious (owning GitHub), perhaps they're after the extra talent to bolster their SharePoint product.

what makes you think that? they killed off their own code hosting site in codeplex and moved everything to github. they are one of the largest if not the largest open source contributors in the world. and .net core is setting itself up to be a major player in cross-platform application development. it has a chance, if microsoft brings over uwp, wpf, and windows forms to .net core, to take over cross-platform gui development. with the windows subsystem for linux, windows 10 can run most linux-based software. they've developed the hottest ide at the moment on top of github developed technology.

i have a feeling they get it just fine.

You mention a lot of stuff that's in the same '.NET world' skellera mentioned, but the currently dominant GUI platform is the web, and neither is going to do take over. There's also still embedded software, hardware description, databases, emulators/simulators, competing virtual machines and GUI frameworks, a whole bunch of non-tech stuff, etc.

They do get a lot of this stuff, but I feel like whatever they want to do with Github is more geared towards average Joe .NET developer. Possibly making the platform less attractive for everything else through neglect.

The new Microsoft has made it clear that they want to support as many areas as they can. Azure does not have any lock-in of a specific platform (other than Azure itself in some ways) and Microsoft is constantly trying to get their tools to work in Linux and Mac. While they obviously would prefer you to be on .Net, they realize that lock-in ultimately hurts them.

Just give it a little more time. They are turning around years of company culture and they're doing a great job at it. If VS Code is a sign of future products, I'm excited to see what they come out with down the road.

Strongly disagree. MSFT is aggressively chasing the "open source"/Silicon Valley crowd, even at the expense of Joe .NET Developer.

Their main competition is AWS and GCP. Very different world.

not really. half the stuff i mentioned is all about the web. that’s the core market for .net core and visual studio code. visual studio code is certainly not .net centric at all. the in the box language support primarily targets web languages.

and i don’t get why you are mentioning those other things. what do they have to do with anything regarding microsoft understanding github? microsoft is no doubt and expert in all of those fields anyway, at least internally.

and what cross-platform gui framework would compete with a .net core cross-platform implementation of uwp, wpf, and windows forms? nothing, in my opinion. people would flood the .net ecosystem to get away from things like c++ and qt and the horror of writing script-based GUIs in python.

IIRC, internally Microsoft views GNU/Linux and GitHub as Big Satan and Little Satan, respectively.

Depends on who you talk to... I'm pretty sure it's MS developers that drove the integration of git repositories into TFS (many were already using git locally for local branches and commits with TFS repos). The move to GitHub for all MS OSS was probably developer driven too.

The Office team is probably more than happy to not be hamstrung to windows only. Particularly Office 365. Azure has been using a lot of non-ms/windows tech from the start.

I'm sure there's some in the recently re-org that used to be Windows still have issues, but the old guard is largely gone now.

Azure team gives a shit about "not invented here". They are exclusively interested in your cpu cycles and bytes in memory. Who organizes the cycles and bytes, they do not care.

Surely, there are preferred stacks (e.g. in the high level PaaS areas), but this includes node, python and .NET.

PS: one save bet: Java will never be on their support list :). But only for legal reasons :)

I constantly remind myself that HN does not actually represent what most customers want and/or need in the real world.

Most routine jobs/contracts at the coalface are still Java/.NET (possibly with a bit of Kotlin thrown in) - I even see companies looking for PHP developers on a weekly basis.

They are definitely alive and kicking, though if you judged based on this website alone, they all ceased to exist 10 years, replaced by Golang, Elixir and Clojure.

Mild exaggeration (and it's not a criticism of the people here), but you get my drift. People here like to talk about new/shiny/cutting-edge - and that's fine, but it's also not necessarily what customers/clients want or need.

C#/.NET in particular, though not perfect, is one of the most pleasurable languages/frameworks to work in.

Many visitors to HN are concerned with selling their skills to various customers, whereas others are concerned with the best technologies for building a successful startup. If you're selling your skills to a legacy institution and want to switch to selling them to a startup, looking at tech discussed on HN could be useful.

The fact that the Microsoft of the past 2 years is "getting better" at something they've tried to do for many decades is a great reason to be worried about them taking ownership of a product they are unfamiliar with.

e.g. "GitHub is really starting to improve again" - Devs in 2050

Why do you think "they are unfamiliar with it"? On the contrary, Microsoft has a lot of stuff ongoing in GitHub. Seems many critical people in this thread don't have a clue.

It's actually really interesting. Seems like internally, MSFT has kind of been let loose and no longer has to adhere to the more strict style Ballmer was a fan of. We've seen this with them hiring OSS talent (Miguel de Icaza, who was a pretty big advocate of trying to make MSFT less proprietary and locked down).

Externally though, the image looks completely different to those who don't really care for what's happening at MSFT - they just seem like an outdated Apple. That's slowly starting to change, I think the Verge recently put out a piece claiming they've switched positions. However, a lot of major consumer problems (Windows Update, Skype) have plagued the company tremendously. No amount of loving Typescript or VSC is going to change that.

Microsoft products are becoming worse on privacy:

1. LinkedIn's dark UI patterns are as bad as they've ever been. Bringing the same to GitHub or otherwise LinkedIn-ifying it seems like a very real risk.

2. Ramping up telemetry. Key loggers in Windows 10, opt-out telemetry in .NET Core, seems impossible to get VSCode to stop phoning home.

This is the stuff we very badly want to avoid.

1. Agreed.

2. (Windows 10) Isn't that only in the technical preview versions? Or is the keylogger in the release versions too?

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