Comment by leetharris
3 months ago
> I wish .NET was more popular among startups, if only C# could get rid of the "enterpisey" stigma.
Too hard to ignore the benefits of cross-stack gains in Typescript/Python. The C# native phone, Blazor, etc just isn't quite there yet. Tried it at the last company, and full stack TS was just so much easier to do.
The reality is that the vast majority of startups don't make it. The #1 thing startups should be focusing on is hiring the right people and product velocity. TS just makes that easier in my experience.
I wish people stopped conflating web programming with the whole realm of software development.
If you ignore Android / iPhone, where language choice is limited, practically all other development is web.
Most of your electronic devices work with embedded software. Production lines, transport gates, cranes, computer hardware, ships, planes, rockets, cars, e-bikes, smart lights...
There is also scientific programming, that feeds research and analysis. Weather reports? Statistics, etc.
And there is gaming.
Devops, infrastructure? Databases? Tools for artists? Most of those aren't web. And yes I've heard of Figma.
There are probably tens of categories I'm missing.
Web is still bigger probably, but I have a problem with the saying "practically all other development is web".
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> practically all
Define “practically all”. I would accept “clear majority”.
But practically all? Nah. I mean the hot new areas for funding right now are AI and robotics neither of which are web!
I’m coming up on 20 years professional experience. Exactly none of it has been mobile or web! The programming field is so much bigger than HN likes to pretend.
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It's web in a (limited) sense that there's probably a web frontend somewhere, but this "somewhere" is usually pretty far away from where most of the code is developed.
Most of the backend logic is not related to serving data for the browsers, it's doing actual backend stuff - communicating to databases, APIs, etc.
Is Google search backend a web app? I think it's really stretching the term.
Sure isn’t.
> practically all other development is web
This is a pretty ignorant take.
Get out of your bubble.
Is it though? Backends can be any language and there's a lot more variety there -- TS+node, Go, Python, Java. It's just .NET that's largely ignored for no real technical basis.
It really depends where you are. In the UK half the places seem to use .NET in some form or another.
I am pretty language agnostic and I am reasonably competent programming in C# (I worked with C# and VB.NET for about 15 years), Go, Python, TypeScript and C++ these days.
The issue with a lot of places that do C#/.NET stuff is that they will typically ignore new tech until it is officially blessed by Microsoft. You can have a piece of tech that everyone is using and works really well and it will be ignored if it isn't blessed by Microsoft.
The other issue with .NET is all the Microsoft gumpf that tends to come with it even with the newer versions of .NET.
I am also in the weird place of being a Linux user. I've had job interviews that wanted to do live coding exercise/take home code exercise and they expect you to do everything in Visual Studio with SQL Server.
Why would they insist on using Visual Studio? At least you can run SQL Server easily on Linux using docker.
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> It's just .NET that's largely ignored for no real technical basis.
As someone who has been developing primarily on .Net for the past decade this is absolute bullshit.
1. It’s only very recently that .Net became open source. Until then you would frequently hit issues where the only option was to rely on the few support calls you got with MS engineers with your $1000+ Visual Studio subscription to move forward. And believe me, this isn’t a pleasant way of debugging. 2. It’s only recently that .Net became cross platform. Until recently .Net meant you had to pay far more money for windows servers, get far less performance, and open your application to way more security issues. And when things broke they broke in highly inscrutable ways. 3. It’s still not a great platform. If you’re deploying on Windows, there are still things you will want to do that will require windows registry changes. 4. It’s only recently that the transition to an open source/cross platform framework has stabilized. Until now you had to deal with MS alphabet and naming goop, an absolutely muddy roadmap, and if you ever got thrown into a project you’d end up finding yourself in a mess of varying conventions, project types, incompatibilities, etc. 5. You know all those performance improvements they’re delivering with every release? There’s a reason for that. Until recently performance was so bad. Kestrel alone provider at least an order of magnitude of improvement. 6. Thank the lord for Jetbrains but other than them, to do proper .Net development you need to use Visual Studio. And Visual Studio is not a pleasant IDE or development environment at all.
There were a lot of technical reasons to not adopt .Net. Even today there’s the problem of MS losing interest or making the wrong choices and there being basically no alternative, because unlike even Java, the .NET ecosystem is completely dependent on what MS does.
By recently you mean a decade ago yeah? I mean it’s fair that it was only a half-decade (.NET 5) when it was genuinely complete enough, but lots of stuff was in good shape when it was called .NET Core.
It sounds like you’re projecting the problems of an existing .NET shop onto the shape of a startup without all that baggage. I can assure you, having worked with many customers running new business on newer .NET, it hasn’t been a legit technical concern since about .NET Core 3.
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You can easily use the same types and libraries in your backend and frontend with TypeScript. It’s not at easy with dotnet.
While suffering the performance loss of V8 versus CLR, JVM or any compiled language.
One of the reasons I am back to writing more C++ code is C++ addons for node.js, as several SaaS products now only care about Next.js as extension SDK.
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>You can easily use the same types and libraries in your backend and frontend with TypeScript. It’s not at easy with dotnet.
You can do that in .NET, too if you use Blazor for frontend.
OpenAPI and client generators solve this issue easily.
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> Backends can be any language
In +90% of cases you will still need a frontend for that backend.
TS full stack is by far the best option for this.
Not really? Having come deom a TS + Go startup it’s pretty trivial to wire up domain objects across each language and define a clean API boundary with some enforcement at build time. And Go was a far better choice for the backend than TS for some lower-level memory considerations.
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What are the cross-stack gains of Python?
Running TypeScript on the server is a well trodden path. It can be pretty fast too. Python on the client, not so much.