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Comment by CharlieDigital

4 months ago

    > People tend to be influenced by opinions online but often the real world is completely different.

Unfortunately, my experience has been that C#'s lack of popularity online translates into a lot of misunderstandings about the language and thus many teams simply do not consider it.

Some folks still think it's Windows-only. Some folks think you need to use Visual Studio. Some think it's too hard to learn. Lots of misconceptions lead to teams overlooking it for more "hyped" languages like Rust and Go.

You don't need to use Visual Studio, but it really makes a difference in the overall experience.

I think there may also be some misunderstandings regarding the purchase models around these tools. Visual Studio 2022 Professional is possible to outright purchase for $500 [0] and use perpetually. You do NOT need a subscription. I've got a license key printed on paper that I can use to activate my copy each time.

Imagine a plumber or electrician spending time worrying about the ideological consequences of purchasing critical tools that cost a few hundred dollars.

[0] https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/d/visual-studio-professional...

  •     > Imagine a plumber or electrician spending time worrying about the ideological consequences of purchasing critical tools that cost a few hundred dollars.
    

    That's just the way it is, especially with startups whom I think would benefit the most from C# because -- believe it or not -- I actually think that most startups would be able to move faster with C# on the backend than TypeScript.

> Some folks think you need to use Visual Studio

How's the LSP support nowadays? I remember reading a lot of complaints about how badly done the LSP is compared to Visual Studio.

  • Pretty good.

    I started using Visual Studio Code exclusively around 2020 for C# work and it's been great. Lightweight and fast. I did try Rider and 100% it is better if you are open to paying for a license and if you need more powerful refactoring, but I find VSC to be perfectly usable and I prefer its "lighter" feel.

  • I still think Visual Studio is better, but you can easily work on small to mid-size projects in VSCode. Could you use Vim? I probably wouldn't, but you can say the same for Java.