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Comment by jschrf | Hacker News Reader

.NET is great. It's fast, clean, and the framework libs are incredibly good. C#, IronPython, and F# are amazing.

I still haven't found an IDE that compares to VS in terms of productivity and usability.

Despite all the things going for it, it's decidely un-trendy and people hate on it. I'm guessing it's primarily because it's from Microsoft.

Software trends are silly.

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It's true. .NET, and C# especially, is one of the few things Microsoft really got right. Anders H is a genius -- he showed it when he did Turbo Pascal, he showed it with Delphi, and he continues to show it with every new release of C#.

Did you know that C# has: lambdas, closures, optional duck typing, first-class functions, better generics than Java, and type inference that is sometimes spooky?

Really, the only flaw I see in C# (and clearly this is my own subjective opinion) is that I now believe dynamically (duck) typed languages are so much more empowering than strongly typed ones. To me, it seems you can get so much more done, faster, and you choose where to expend your energy to get "automated correctness". But even there, C# has the new "dynamic" keyword that allows for duck typing, so it is moving in the right direction.

Oh, one other flaw -- C# isn't homoiconic. But every other language but you-know-what fails that one :)

Prolog is another that passes. The Pure language - interpreted but not compiled - should count. Compile time self modification is still there though. In terms of macros for code generation, syntactic extensibility, runtime+compile time reflection and staged computation without homoiconicity; Nemerle is one on .NET.

C# is one step closer with its upcoming compiler as a service. Available in mono now.

"Did you know that C# has: lambdas, closures, optional duck typing, first-class functions, better generics than Java, and type inference that is sometimes spooky?"

I did know that, and these things heavily factor into why I default to C# for most projects these days! .NET 4 is awesome.

C# is an excellent language. It has all these great things, yet doesn't feel polluted or bloated at all. I absolutely love lambdas, closures, and generics. They help write concise and clear code. Generic support in C# and F# and the CLR itself is brilliant.

Writing event-driven, asynchronous IO code in .NET code is a breeze. It seems like the current programming trend around these parts is focused on "iterating fast" and having async IO. C# gives me both of these things, with the bonus of having the compiler catch most of my errors.

I disagree with the general notion that duck-typed languages are more empowering or let you iterate faster than strongly typed languages.

If you think that a language that is lazy (or worse, unspecific) about types lets you write code faster, I think that you have some fundamental problems with how you approach development.

The whole dynamic languages = faster code production is an unsettling school of thought, in my opinion.

"If you think that a language that is lazy (or worse, unspecific) about types lets you write code faster, I think that you have some fundamental problems with how you approach development.

The whole dynamic languages = faster code production is an unsettling school of thought, in my opinion."

Well, that's what I used to think too. The million dollar question is ... have you tried it?

I did a heavy Javascript project recently, and I was amazed at how much faster I could go from a vision of a complex solution to having that solution implemented.

Writing event-driven, asynchronous IO code in .NET code is a breeze.

It's about to get even breezier: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/vstudio/gg316360

    .NET is great. It's fast, clean, and the 
    framework libs are incredibly good.

Having worked with .NET, I beg to differ -- .NET framework libs are a mess.

    C#, IronPython, and F# are amazing.

It's not the languages that keep people away from .NET -- to put it simply -- community, tools, price.

Microsoft does a good job at playing catch-up, but unfortunately (for them) when it comes to web development, innovation happens somewhere else.

And sure, Visual Studio compensates for a lot, but it's just an IDE, the least important part of the stack.

I am just curious. What .Net libraries do you find messed up?

I agree, C# is awesome developer experience in terms of the IDE, but the rest of .Net ecosystem has never really materialized.

Software stasis aka Java, seems to me more silly than software trends. I can't see any good reason reason to stay with Java when Scala exists.

I recently started using C#, VS and TFS after many years with Java and Python, SVN, and IntelliJ/Eclipse.

I can see why people prefer C# to Java, C# is better than Java.

TFS for version control I have more trouble liking. It seems to be inefficient across slow WAN's and is far below GIT etc. But if everyone is local and your needs are simple it can work.

Visual Studio for me (with Resharper installed) is slow, buggy and just dumb. In Eclipse or IntelliJ code updates during debugging worked ok, better if Zero Turnaround was installed, VS not so much. Navigating with IntelliJ was just better, with visual clues about how to get to implementations etc. And Visual Studio hangs for me regularly.

But worst of all clicking any of the Test buttons results in 15 seconds of waiting before I see a pass or fail. This just kills me.

I see a strong pro Microsoft bias in the .Net development community and I think this is a strong negative. It reminds me of the days before log4j beat Sun's util logging when inferior Sun technology won in the Java community.

When I switched from .net MVC to Rails after a few years with Microsoft, my biggest pain was from missing VS. Rock solid variable renaming, autocompletion and method look up saved so much time.

I use Eclipse a lot, as well as a sprinkling of other IDEs. I tend miss autocompletion too (support for generics and polymorphism? yes please) but the thing I tend to miss the most is the debugger. Nothing else even comes close.

Well, I don't agree about polymorphism (but that's a whole different conversation) :) I forgot about the integrated debugger though. I sure do miss variable inspection without littering code with puts.

I still haven't found an IDE that compares to VS in terms of productivity and usability.

The elephant in the room here is cost. I work in various flavors of Visual Studio every day, and it is a nice IDE, but if I was bootstrapping a company, I'm not sure I'd want to shell out the money for an MSDN subscription[1]. I get the impression from the post that the toolset was already in place (paid for).

[1] I haven't looked at subscription options recently, so perhaps there is a start-up friendly level these day?

There sure is: http://www.microsoft.com/bizspark/Default.aspx

IDE's are for _lusers_. Vim FTW! And Emacs is cool too. Vim can do more than any IDE (fantastic built by the community plugins). And imho one needs to be retarded if one uses something else than hjkl or C-n, C-p, to navigate within a text document.

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