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Comment by LAC-Tech | Hacker News Reader

Is .NET entering its twilight years as a tech people build new things with?

I just can't imagine Gen Z wanting to start a project in C#.

I realise there are still .NET shops, and I still talk to people who do it daily, but ours is a field driven by fashion whether we care to admit or not - and C# just does not feel as fashionable as it once did

(I'm a former C# dev, up until 2020)

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I personally can't think of an all-rounder language that is better than C#. It's fast, has great tooling, powerful, extremely productive for working with large code bases and runs 'anywhere'.

JS has lost against TS which is basically C# for web (both designed by the same person) and Python is not really something you should build large applications with (execution speed + maintenance issues).

What do you believe is the current language du jour?

Golang is often the default now. As someone who’s new to backend development, I’ve been exploring C# and can’t understand why it’s not the default. I think C# primarily has a marketing problem.

The name ".NET" feels like it's from another era.

I think they would have done themselves a favor had they just rebranded as `dot`.

`dot build`

`dot run`

`dot publish`

`dot test`

Waaaaay better

I personally can't think of an all-rounder language that is better than C#

I didn't ask about whether it was good.

I asked about whether it's past its peak.

It's certainly reaching "maturity". And I'd say it's improving still but the improvements are small (which is expected at that point).

I wouldn't say it's past its peak because it's still improving and there is no good alternative for a language of its class. Go isn't it (I doubt there will be a good desktop/mobile app/game engine etc story for Go in the future). Swift could have been a competitor in the allround space but Apple doesn't seem interested in conquering the world outside its own garden. I'm not sure who it would be that would make the "next" C# and .NET. Only Microsoft and Apple are making commercial desktop environments, for example.

I've been using .Net for almost 20 years, professionally for half that time, and I feel like excitement and momentum in the community has only been increasing.

Same story here. I decided lately to focus more on .net and, let's say, abandon Java.

It's portable, fast, productive and well supported by a massive corp. It's not just a "language du jour", it's here to stay.

There are plenty of job in dotnet where I live: old, new, startups...

I am the momentum!

I'd say it's never been better tbh. I can't speak for Gen Z but .NET (for some reason) was never the choice of startups. Possibly because there is still a cost associated with the best developer experiences, such as for the best IDE's in editions that allow any size of for-profit org.

Well, JavaScript is older than C# and still poppin. Gen Z eats it up. C# too, for unity gamez.

It is definitely out of fashion, most directly in comparison to Go I suppose. It seems like they tried with .NET Core, but were not able to provide an appealing and coherent enough on-ramp. The ongoing death of native windows applications not helping either certainly.

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