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Comment by pron | Hacker News Reader

No, but it's hard to define what .NET is, because while there has been something called .NET for 20 years, it hasn't quite been the same thing. Is .NET now (.NET Core) the same platform as .NET of 2005?

Also .NET is not as popular, and its adoption is also a little weird. It's quite popular overall, but doesn't dominate any domain. It's used on the server but not nearly as much as Java; it's used on the client, but not nearly as much as JavaScript. I think it's still largely confined to Microsoft shops.

So both in longevity and popularity it's not quite in the same class as those others.

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Java surely hasn't taken any bite out of .NET desktop development, or the game industry, with exception of Minecraft.

Regarding defining what Java is, what about Android Java, real time Java, Java on mainframes, forks like microEJ, Graal, OpenJ9, Azul....

Just as hard to define.

I never said Java took a share of .NET's desktop, but the dominant client-side platform these days is neither Java nor .NET. And by Java I mean the 27-year-old Java SE specification (real-time Java makes up for a negligible portion of Java's market share, and while JavaCard is incredibly popular, I count it separately).

You're right, it is Android Java, which isn't Oracle's Java.

On a .NET/Java shop and we have like 50% of both stacks in every, single, project.

Nowadays I tend to spend most of my time on the .NET side, because I get to enjoy Valhalla, Vectors, async/await, TPL, since years now, instead of waiting for what might never come.

I get to be on both sides of the coin, which would be advisable to the Java team to better know the competition.

Android "Java" isn't Java, full stop, because Java is a specification for a platform and there has never been a Java platform specification that Android conformed to. But the important aspect for this particular discussion is that both longevity and popularity apply to Java SE.

As for competition, we follow what's going on in .NET, JavaScript, Python, Go, and even far less popular languages such as Haskell and Erlang. But regardless of your personal preferences -- some share them while for others Java's superiority in GC, monitoring, compilation, backward compatibility, and language simplicity matter more -- C#/.NET is not yet in the same club as C, Python, JS, and Java in terms of longevity and popularity, and that's what I'm talking about here.

> C#/.NET is not yet in the same club as C, Python, JS, and Java in terms of longevity and popularity

C# is more than 20 years old, it runs on everything and everywhere. It has multiple toolchains and IDEs

It's not really more than 20 years old because the current platform is not backward-compatible with the old one, and even if it were it doesn't have the same status and/or popularity as those other languages.

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