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Comment by mmillin | Hacker News Reader

I’m curious if .NET can compare here, though I have limited experience with rails or ASP.NET both seem to give you a lot to work with. Though the overlap of rails devs with .NET devs seems minimal.

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I learned to code professionally in Ruby but wrote C# .Net for almost 10 years. I've probably forgotten more about .Net than I ever learned about Ruby at this point so take what I say with a grain of salt.

.Net has tons of configuration and boilerplate so I can't say that it's exactly the same in that sense, but the more meta theme is that just as there is a Rails way to do things, there is a Microsoft way to do things. Unlike Java where you're relying on lots of third party packages that while well maintained, aren't owned by the same company that does the language, framework, ORM, database, cloud provider, IDE and so on. Having a solid well documented default option that will work for 99% of use cases takes a lot of the load of decision making off your shoulders and also means you'll have plenty of solid documentation and examples you can follow. I've been in JVM land for the past couple years and it just can't compare.

I know Java people will come fight with me after this but I just don't think they know any better.

I think the Java people would say that if you want one way to do things, go do it the Microsoft way :)

But I guess Spring tried to do that, but probably didn't have the resources that Microsoft does.

I wish I could :)

I don't want to fight you, because I don't know .Net well enough to have an opinion.

But I just want to say that I have the same feel when I develop using Spring Boot. I am extremely productive and seldom have to pull dependencies outside Spring for 80% of what I make.

I still don't get why .NET barely ever gets mentioned in these threads. Even new or niche frameworks like Phoenix, loco.rs and others get mentioned, but almost never .NET. It's as "convention over configuration" as it gets.

Platform support and open-sourcedness. The Phoenix 1.0 release predates the first open-source and Linux-supported .NET release by a year, for example. .NET is just now starting to shake off its association as a closed-source, Windows-only thing.

.NET has been open source since a decade

And Ruby on Rails was released 20 years ago

Yes, like I said before, Phoenix 1.0 predates the first open-source and Linux-supported .NET release by a year.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10135825

https://github.com/dotnet/core/blob/main/release-notes%2F1.0...

People aren't just going to jump onto something recently open-sourced by a company that popularized the phrase "embrace, extend, extinguish". For the last decade, they've had to earn people's goodwill, while with a project like Rails, there is no "we used to be closed source but now we're not, use our thing!" to overcome. So in the 20 years since Rails has been released, it has only ever needed to demonstrate its usefulness.

Now that a decade has past, that negative association is starting to wash away a little.

Asp.net core is actually pretty simple to stand up and bang something out. Stick to the Microsoft docs and most patterns are handled.

I can't really say how the web UI side holds up to alternatives, tho.

I hated asp.net mvc, I think due to the large amount of layers and boilerplate that had to be banged out.

FWIW MVC is completely optional nowadays.

Take a look at this: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/aspnet/core/fundamentals/m...

Thanks for that link. If I'm not wrong, it doesn't change the fact that compared to Rails or Django there's a lot of boilerplate that needs to be written to get a database-driven web app running.

What makes you think this way?

I’m pretty sure even back then Entity Framework was very capable, it has only improved since then.

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/ef/core/querying/complex-q...

It’s probably better to compare with other statically typed, compiled languages since both Ruby and Python are an in a different class (and an order of magnitude slower, more painful dependency management, etc.).

The only thing I don't like about ASP.NET is all the dependency injection, last time I looked it seemed unavoidable.

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