Sad this gets to front page while a blog post which documents that .NET 8 has 200 A4 pages worth of performance improvements gets absolutely ignored.
C# keeps being the language people are looking for but don't know about.
C# keeps being the language people are looking for but don't know about.
Hard to overstate the mindshare that it lost for that
The bias does exist but it's going away, especially that now a lot of developers are moving over to M-series macs.
With that said, it is a cool language and platform, that is indeed underhyped.
Java eco system is so vast, and of top notch quality, with excellent documentation available for free. It enables businesses to move faster, at a pace most other languages cannot offer. It's not perfect, especially I find data sciene libraries lacking in Java compared to what the Python eco system offers. But depending on the task I try to choose the right tool for the job, not the same language for every job.
C# and .NET are most heavily invested in by Microsoft which owns and steers its development, that is true. It is also true that JVM world sees investment from multiple MSFT-sized corporations.
And yet, despite the above, it keeps moving forward and outperforming Java on user experience, performance and features despite being worked on by much smaller teams. I think it stands on its own as a measure of a well-made technology.
In addition, you can look at source code and contribute yourself, 90% of what makes .NET run is below. Almost all development happens in the open:
https://github.com/dotnet/runtime
https://github.com/dotnet/installer
https://github.com/dotnet/roslyn
https://github.com/dotnet/aspnetcore
As for career opportunities, as other commenters would note, this is highly specific to a region and does not translate globally. Again, we are discussing the "how good the language/platform is" first and foremost. I don't see startups adopting Go because of the market or trusting Google not to rug pull them...so perhaps we can do a better job so the next language of choice they pick is C#, which has much higher ROI in the hands of the good developers (for example, it can be very easy to adopt as a second language if you are well versed in Rust).
It has features like LINQ. It has routinely had a lot of good updates, new features always coming out, increases in performance, etc. The primary thing lacking has been good support for developing and deploying on Linux, and a couple other devops-related things. It's a shame to see that holding it back, but at least MSFT actually opened up Linux support at all (nobody thought they would).
I'm not sure what vested interest MSFT had in some of the changes introduced for iOS in .NET 8, but now it can be targeted with NativeAOT too, so there is clear investment and dev effort both from community contributors and MSFT employees to support various platforms.
Somewhat arbitrary example, there is also a project to support RISC-V (https://github.com/dotnet/runtime/issues/84834).
Azure is also the big moneymaker, so these days they want all their technologies to have Linux support since that's the dominant cloud OS.
In my limited 6 years of professional experience as a software engineer, I have never met a single person who writes C# or .NET.
Every time I point out about C# most programmers are saying about evil Microsoft and being locked in the ecosystem. Most programmers I've met do not even know that .NET Core is MIT open-source and runs on any device.
I really wish C# would be more widely used because it is amazing, and for sure 10 times better then Java.
We have an ODATA client that we build our selves to use in our React frontend. Now, this would obviously not have been something we also used on the backend if we knew what we know now, but it’s the perfect example to illustrate my decades of experience with C#. We had the client because we use a lot of Office365 and BC36 APIs and they are ODATA, and since we had the client we figured we might as well use ODATA on our internal APIs. Which was all well and good until we tried mixing EntityFramework, ASP versioning and ODATA together. These are all Microsoft packages mind you, and they just don’t work together. They each use the Model builder magic that C# comes with, but they each use it differently enough that things become a nightmare. Which basically sums up why C# has been a terrible language for its entire existence.
If you never get to those breaking points, then C# is fine. But when you use it for what you’d assume it was intended for, well… At least the ODATA experience sort of triggered my C# PTSD from back when I wrote an admin system to maintain all the thousands of school printers and computers in a municipality, which was hefty Active Directy work and an absolute nightmare to the point where I literally had to either extend or rewrite half the Microsoft packages because they either weren’t finished or outright terrible (again likely because they weren’t finished). Similar to how the ODATA, ASP versioning and EntiryFramework packages aren’t really finished right now. I mean, I can look at the road map for EF and see some of our issues as planned fixes on who knows when. Anyway, since those days more than a decade ago, it’s become obvious that if you want to do anything AD related then you need to use PowerShell and not C#, really, C# doesn’t even run in Azure runbooks and Python does so it’s obvious that Microsoft themselves don’t really use a whole lot of C# for that part of IT operations internally. And I think it’s frankly the same with a lot of things. The ODATA package seems to fall in that same “not used by Microsoft” box. Because it appears to be some sort of “fork” that’s mostly maintained by a single employee in China.
So yes, if you just use regular ASP and EF without versioning or ODATA to do very standard CRUD monolith APIs it’s a language that’s both fast and productive. Sure you’ll still need to do all sorts of silly things with your Azure DevOps pipelines to get EF migrations for Microsoft’s own SQL server to work, but hey, you can. But if you’re actually going to be doing things that takes it beyond it’s “basics” then no, C# is really not the language people are looking for but don’t know about.
I’m also partly in the “Java is sort of 10 years late with 21” club, but it’s not like anyone has switched away from Java in those 10 years, and really, it’s not like it was a fun experience to go through the .Net -> .Net Core -> .Net, .Net Standard and .Net Core -> .Net years, so maybe Java did it right?
I was just pointing out that your critique was about the included batteries, not the language. Every language has some bad libraries in its ecosystem.
We all know C# exists