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Comment by fergie | Hacker News Reader

Read the whole article nodding my head at all the valid criticisms of .NET, but towards the end I began to wonder: when are the arguments in favour of .NET coming? And finally, at the very end, this paragraph appeared:

" .NET is a great technology for experienced developers who grew up with the platform as it matured, but I'm not sure if I'd still enjoy learning it today as much as I did in 2008. Whilst the complexity allows me to charge great fees to clients for writing software in .NET, I'd probably not recommend it to a friend who wants to learn how to code or I wouldn't use it for building my own startup from the grounds up. "

Is it really the case that the only argument for using .NET is that you can earn a lot of money by working as a .NET consultant? From my own experience I always assumed that it was, but I would love to learn about some actual benefits that .NET has over competing platforms.

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I can share some insight here. I got into .NET (Core) by virtue of joining a company that used it, after previously focusing mostly on Python and JavaScript (with a self-taught background in C going back to childhood prior to that).

Initially I had the same tribalism that a lot of people seem to have towards .NET, for whatever reason. Eventually though, my conclusions:

- .NET Core is pretty reasonable. Platform agnostic, easy to work with, decent command-line tooling, and doesn't force you into an IDE vertical unless you want to. - C# can be a nice language for certain types of business applications. I think it has a lot of the good modeling properties that once made Java the de-facto language for enterprise development, without some of the verbosity and other drawbacks (though maybe Java has changed too since I last looked at it :) ). It plays very nicely with Domain Driven Design and event sourcing, both of which are patterns that I find valudable on large-scale systems for managing business transactions.

Overall TLDR: I probably wouldn't use .NET if I started a company tomorrow, but when I start coding non-trivially sized things in Python I sometimes miss elements of what .NET/C# brings (particularly interfaces, which obviously also exist in other languages).

- Platform agnostic

- Decent command-line tooling

- Doesn't force you into an IDE vertical unless you want to

I'm not saying that the points above aren't true exactly, but surely they are less true for .NET than they are for just about any other mainstream development stack?

Yeah, lol - I guess I mean that they were "considerably more true than I expected them to be, based on my previous prejudices about .NET"

Before I was forced to try it, if you had asked me whether having a "normal" development experience using .NET was possible I would have said "no way". After being forced to do it I was pleasantly surprised to see that it didn't feel particularly different to most other compiled languages that I've used. YMMV.

Interesting- thanks for sharing!

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