Comment by abofh | Hacker News Reader

Comment by abofh | Hacker News Reader

The snarky answer is that it's easier to be a full stack developer if your stack starts and ends with JavaScript. It's also the real answer - most webapps create value in the instant of views or clicks, so being charged solely on those metrics (even 200%) can make a certain amount of business sense, and if your business doesn't have need for redundant data stores or major backend services, you can get a lot of mileage out of a vercel based infrastructure.

I personally can't stand it, and actively work to excise it from front-end applications though _because_ it's difficult to work with it as a 'part' of your world. Like a lot of dev-experiential products/business models, their moat only exists if they can keep you "in" vercel, the moment they become just nodejs + lambda to a customer, then their value-add ceases; So they make it difficult to "grow up" out of vercel -- for many shops that's fine, it will be all they need from it, so a premium for a polished nodejs+lambda+deployment+cdn experience is worth it.

But if you're a micro-arch with backend services running on your own cloud, vercel will always be the wart in your infrastructure making everything from network policy to authentication and monitoring or tracing more difficult.

> The snarky answer is that it's easier to be a full stack developer if your stack starts and ends with JavaScript.

That doesn't need to be snarky. I know JavaScript and a variety of other languages, but if I'm picking a stack to work on the whole of, it's going to be a whole lot less context switching to use one language throughout, so JavaScript (in fact, TypeScript) it generally is.

I find C# and TS to largely be "congruent" and rather easy to switch between [0].

I think the biggest "growing pain" is that C# runtime is multi-threaded so devs that are used to single-threaded Node.js environment need to understand object lifetimes. (Of course there are other differences as well, but the biggest IMO is understanding threading and object lifecycles in the underlying runtime.)

Syntactically identical promises/futures; syntactically identical lambdas; largely congruent tuples, classes, interfaces, generics, anonymous objects. C# 13 collection initializers are going to largely feel like JS array initializers.

Minor syntax differences can be picked up quickly. Frameworks like Nest.js are super similar to .NET Web API.

[0] https://github.com/CharlieDigital/js-ts-csharp

My biggest hurdle when trying C# (along with a very select few other languages) is that it’s very difficult to get working properly in my own environment.

I use an apple computer and prefer to write my code in a simple text editor. Getting C# (or god forbid C++) just running in such a way that I can just focus on the code and not the surrounding environment or build tools took me long enough the last time I tried, that I decided to just not use C#.

When was the last time you tried C#? These days, it's as simple as getting dotnet and executing "dotnet new <template> -o MyNewProject" to make a new project. Then "dotnet run" or "dotnet watch". Also, the VSCode extension (with C# Dev Kit) is pretty good nowadays compared to other languages (I personally find it as good as rust-analyzer), but certainly not as good as Rider for enterprises; I mainly use VSCode in fact.

Seconding sibling comment, all you need is:

    brew install dotnet-sdk
    dotnet new console -o ConsoleApp --aot
    cd ConsoleApp
    dotnet publish -o .
    ./ConsoleApp

(it may take extra time for bulding it for the first time, particularly pulling in IL Compiler dependency, but all subsequent compilations will be fast)

Feel free to comment out `PublishAot` property in .csproj file if you don't want AOT (i.e. using libraries that want JIT), or use dotnet watch and run commands for quick iteration.

Note that for rich editing experience you do not need C# Dev Kit (which requires an account), only a baseline C# extension which has all the good bits. For running and debugging the project out of VS Code - upon first F5 press it will suggest generating config assets for .NET project it managed to find in an opened folder - just agree and it will work on the next F5 press.

You can also write C# with Neovim and csharp-ls.

I'm a macOS (MBP M1) daily driver doing .NET dev professionally; it's super simple to get up and running with VS Code or even vim or emacs.

Give it another look!

>> if your business doesn't have need for redundant data stores or major backend services

If that’s the case, your web app is much less complex too, which reduces the need for a product that reduces complexity?

The reduced type of complexity is operational complexity, the need to at least have surface understanding of how to integrate/use a CDN, deployment tooling etc.

Why the service economy instead of doing it all yourself ? Generally people find the things they spend their money on valuable to them

Lets say you have an idea and want to make money from it. Does it make sense to spend weeks trying to get your infrastructure right vs. just start solving your problem domain? In a lot of cases it's worth the extra cost just to have something up and running quickly. Iterating over your software instead of your infrastructure.

It's the same for a lot of similar things, Deno land, cloudflare workers/pages, etc. Things that reduce the friction to get something running online can be beneficial. They all have practical offsets and negatives too.

It's not a bad decision so much as a decision of where you derive value, and how much.

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