Comment by mattmanser
3 months ago
I use .Net a lot as in Europe it's everywhere. I think it occupies the same niche in Europe as Java does in America. Startups, enterprise, you name it. Lots of jobs in London with it for Finance.
And in 20 years I've personally never needed a paid library. Maybe one company had bought Telerik back in the day? I've now built up multiple startups, some with millions of users.
The only thing I ever plugin that's not a MS library really are serilog, validation with FluentValidation, and a job server, usually Hangfire just because it's easy. Other than that, most people have good C# API clients. Oh and OAuth, though the popular one got baited and switched like you said.
The key difference is that the core libraries cover much more for .Net than most other languages. I'm constantly adding npm modules, but rarely nuget packages.
But the opensource/closed source bait and switch has happened a lot recently it does seem. Someone was blaming it on some failure of an open source initiative MS were running.
But one of the big frustrations sometimes is dealing with some American Koolaid company who thinks Erlang support is a priority but .Net isn't. No code examples, no officially supported library. Most recent example, IBM of all people (C-level insisting we use their cloud, ugh).
C# is pretty popular in the US as well in certain spaces... especially Govt or Banking and adjacent environments. Mostly line of business applications. I'd say Java is slightly more popular, but I never really liked Java's ecosystem ergonomics, though they're better today it's just not for me.
Similarly, I'm not a fan of "Enterprise" development regardless... I find a lot of .Net shops, like Jave, just create a lot of layers of indirection and abstraction that only lead to excess complexity, cost and difficulty in both maintenance and enhancement. The older I get, the more my mindset shifts to make things that are easy to replace without adding undue complexity or patterns.
The problem with enterprise apps is that they're usually wide but shallow. Which means a ton of classes that don't do a lot and managing class complexity is actually the biggest challenge.
So it's just a very different type of code and you can point at the language, but the reality is that it's the domain.