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Comment by untog | Hacker News Reader

I miss C# something rotten. It's such a great language, and I miss being able to use stuff like LINQ every day. But the community just isn't here - everyone is working on huge-scale corporate projects, and comparatively few are working on great stuff like Nancy.fx (a lightweight web MVC framework).

That said, I bought a license for MonoTouch, and I'm hoping that I'll be able to use C# for cool stuff in the future. Just with as little of the ASP.NET stuff as possible.

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this is the same thing in almost any community. You have a handful of people who are dedicated to the open source movement of the language and the reset just sit by the sidelines.

There's nothing wrong with this though. Not everyone has spare time in their lives to dedicate to open source.

I think it's different when the language has open source roots. A ton of ASP.NET libraries are paid products, and support for them comes at a premium. You don't see that anywhere near as much in Ruby or Node.

A few years ago, I participated on a interview for a job (in a startup) which requires some skills in ASP.NET. When I started talking to company owner and I said to him that I knew PHP (and ASP.NET too, of course), he started to say that ASP.NET is better because it's paid, expensive and it has a great support from Microsoft... That's all he said about it. Later on, I discovered that almost 7/10 of big companies' IT managers think the same, that's why ASP.NET still has its audience. The same goes on with Oracle.

They're not wrong, though. It's all about priorities. With an MS product you do get good support, and someone to shout at if something is not behaving as expected. With open source tech you can submit a patch to fix it yourself.

Which was exactly the sentiment of my manager in previous org: "You can use open source as long as they have commercial support".

You sometimes get good support. I've spent too much time on the phone to then (as a gold partner) and got sod all back on most occasions. If you're lucky you get a workaround but most of the time it's denial.

I've always been a little skeptical of the value of commercial support with proprietary development tools relative to community support with established, popular open source development tools. Is the average time between discovering a problem and identifying a good solution shorter? It would be hard to design a good study for this, but every programmer I've talked to with professional experience in both types of environment has told me that paid support was not an advantage for them.

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