Comment by anuraaga | Hacker News Reader

Comment by anuraaga | Hacker News Reader

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I suspect many developers, including OpenAI engineers are using VSCode, maybe TypeScript for frontend engineers, GitHub for sure which had no real features like pull request approvers before Microsoft money came in. Less at OpenAI most likely, but C# and .NET are going strong with bleeding edge tech like .NET chisel containers support. And I've seen great support from their engineers working on OSS, best of FAANG.

Google created the meme that a company could be evil or not but we're past that age. Let's focus on the experiences, and while not forgetting the past (yes the 90s do not paint MS well), be forgiving. MS seems to continue to develop and even innovate on a lot of this tech, painting them as an evil dinosaur seems frankly ridiculous. Yes as with any large company, there will be parts that are good and parts that are not.

Disclaimer: I have never worked at Microsoft and own no stock directly though so have ETFs. And through OSS I have some friends there that I strongly respect and think are awesome and always think of them any time I see hate talk towards MS, which is unfortunately common...

Most of OpenAIs tech stack is AI toolage, but basically everything you interact with is written in Python. Nobody uses C# for anything serious, because why would you?

It’s not a bad language, it’s just not a very good language either. Need efficiency? Rust/C++. Need an all round language? Node or Python, which are less efficient, but still powerful enough to power Instagram and well OpenAI as far as Python goes and LEGO as far as Typescript goes. Realistically you’re looking to choose between C#, Java and Go. Both Java and Go are miles ahead of C# in terms of concurrency, I mean, C# is still stuck with “await” after all, and while I guess you can have a lengthy debate on C# vs Java, 9 gazillion large companies use Java while 0 use C#.

It’s not that C# is bad, like I said. It’s never really been better than it is now, it’s more a question of why would you ever use it? Even the C# developers at Microsoft admit to prototyping using Python because it’s just so much faster to build things with it, and while they do move things to C#, you have to wonder if they would if they weren’t working for Microsoft.

> painting them as an evil dinosaur seems frankly ridiculous.

Hard to understand this point of view with:

- vscode being "open source", conveniently leaving out flagship features like live share and Python extension

- Increase of "in your face, fuck you" dark patterns like forcing an account for Windows setup, forcing ms authenticator, etc

Not sure I quite follow the point, Microsoft maintains PyLance and Pyright, tools that have had a large positive impact on Python development, including AI. Not sure about live share, but if there are feature gaps with paid IDEs I would say they're not so large - the functionality available for free in VSCode or its ecosystem (enabled by Microsoft with the help of many OSS developers) has helped democratize software engineering in a great way.

Yes they have some problems in hiding their attempts for lockin on the Windows side but ignoring all the good and just labeling them terrible for that is troubling.

> Not sure I quite follow the point, Microsoft maintains PyLance and Pyright, tools that have had a large positive impact on Python development,

I think GP's point is that PyLance and Pyright, while free, are still proprietary and not open-source.

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