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Comment by Pxtl | Hacker News Reader

As a C# developer I always find the problem with C# is the lack of any Darwinean process in MS libs. In a platform with a stronger open-source community, libraries battle it out in the marketplace of ideas and users and generally the solid ones rise to the top.

In .NET, MS provides everything, and the OSS counterparts are second-fiddle to the blessed libs. This is a problem since it stifles the OSS community trying to compete with first-party product... and while MS has generally competent coders and products, sometimes they make mistakes that are agonizing pain-points... and the MS obsession with "no breaking changes" means that those pain-points will never be fixed.

No MS mistake is ever fixed. It is replaced with a new library with a whole new week-long learning-curve and its own foibles and mistakes, which will, in turn, never be fixed.

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I'm a C# dev too and I agree with you on the lack of "Darwinean selection". Definitely a downside of working on the Microsoft stack. Some of the great innovations coming out of the FOSS community seem to take a long time to reach us.

On the other hand, we miss a lot of the churn caused by people chasing after the latest js library, which also seems to be a big preoccupation of the FOSS community. If you're building software that has to last for years then stability of the underlying platform and having fewer ways to do something can be an advantage.

> On the other hand, we miss a lot of the churn caused by people chasing after the latest js library, which also seems to be a big preoccupation of the FOSS community. If you're building software that has to last for years then stability of the underlying platform and having fewer ways to do something can be an advantage.

Don't make me figure out how many database access approaches there are in stock .NET. :-)

More seriously, JS devs seem to have a thing for reinventing each others wheels - not just once, but tens of times (hyberbole). I really don't see that behavior in other communities by and large. The worst I've seen elsewhere is 3 similar Python libs

I dig appreciate the stability argument though. Which is why I'm a Common Lisp fan; its a standardized and mostly extensible language.

"Don't make me figure out how many database access approaches there are in stock .NET. :-)" - one high-level using Entity Framework, one low-level using ADO.NET. Non-stock options are plenty.

I've heard this a lot but haven't experienced it. Could you give an example?

ASP MVC

...is open source.

I use ServiceStack under Mono as an alternative to Asp.net mvc and I love it.

I disagree with Pxtl overall, but there are some high profile examples like Microsoft's Entity Framework coming from way behind and eventually overshadowing established open source ORMs like NHibernate.

On the other hand, creating a new ASP.NET MVC project with the official Microsoft template that ships with Visual Studio automatically pulls in open source libraries/frameworks like jQuery, Bootstrap, and Json.NET, not Microsoft-reinvented versions of those things.

I meant more specifically some of these "pain points" where undesirable behaviors stay in the library so changes won't break anything.

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