[lordleft]

Something I've been wrestling with is the perceived 'unsexiness' of certain technologies, like C#. When I joined this industry, I thought that anything that wasn't powered by Rust or Python or Haskell was irredeemable, that C# was a dinosaur not long for this world, and that tech unicorns would be set the tone of our industry going forward. Now that I'm a bit older I've begun to see that something like C# isn't going away anytime soon - that people still use .NET and other technologies because the enterprise endures, and companies like Microsoft are continually investing in their tooling. This article reminded me that sometimes unsexy technology powers the world, and if you can bring value and or mastery of that technology you can greatly benefit.

[saberience]

I'm reading this comment thinking about how wrong you could possibly be, or maybe how out of touch you are with C#, .Net, and how its perceived.

C# and .Net Core are miles away from unsexy, enterprise technologies. Microsoft has been doing an amazing job on the C# language in recent years, open-sourcing everything, making .Net Core run on every platform, being totally open about future updates, and pushing the .Net core framework to be more performant than about every other language other than C++, C, and Rust.

I work for a 2B valuation "startup" and we are fully .net core, all running in orchestrated Docker clusters and I perceive that choice as one of the reasons behind our success. The tooling and libraries, documentation, performance, etc, are in my opinion ahead of any other languages we could use: e.g. Java, Python, Haskell etc.

[karmakaze]

The difference between a company that benefits from 'tech' and one that doesn't is how their tech is used. If they use off the shelf tech to directly build their business, it isn't so much a tech company as it is app development, IT, or whatever you name it.

If however, you use whatever good or average off the shelf tech and build tools that leverage the tech then apply it to your business then you're a tech company. You can't just make the app you have to build tech to build the company. This is your advantage. The tech you build can be software or it can be patents or it can be proprietary processes but it has to be leveraged. My way to estimate this is to count the number of employees that build product or tools. The size of sales/marketing can vary but excessive numbers of devs isn't a good sign for a tech company and might just be a consultancy.

[oldmanhorton]

Dont forget that even if C# feels old and stodgy, F# gives a very fresh and "cool" experience on top of .NET

[np_tedious]

Agreed. Also the recent C# language developments are themselves pretty good, as are the runtime / SDK improvements in dotnet core.

With mostly a Linux, python / slightly FP background I "should" be the skeptic. But a recent project had me on a dotnet core app developed mostly on OSX and deployed on Linux. It was honestly pretty neat and while I no longer work on it, I am bullish on this space.