Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by xupybd 1618 days ago
I'm making the choice for a new tech stack and .NET is winning. For getting the job done reliably it's looking like the strongest contender.

I'm not sure why there isn't more momentum towards using .NET.

2 comments

> I'm not sure why there isn't more momentum towards using .NET.

I've thought about this too.

Although I've done DotNet since 2001 I'm not blind to the faults; I also do Go, Node, Ruby, Python, and PHP. What I've concluded (and I could be wrong) is that as powerful as DotNet is it is held back, understandably, by the Windows-centric nature of the original .NET Framework (ending at v4).

Unless an open-minded assessment is done, that (fair) bias means that it isn't really taken seriously outside of enterprise. Which is a shame as it is (to within a degree that makes the difference irrelevant) as productive as Rails, as powerful as Java, as performant as Go, and as easy to read (when written well) as Python or Ruby.

Coupled with the fact that it is now cross-platform with self-contained and trimmed single binaries, it really is a shame.

I still remember the first thing that got me looking at Ruby was actually Rails, and it was doing the 15 minute build-a-blog tutorials. Nowadays with EF Core, DotNet 6, Postgres, migrations, and scaffolding, it is almost as fast in DotNet. And the result is a type-safe codebase that requires massively less resources to scale.

> I'm not sure why there isn't more momentum towards using .NET.

I can't quite pinpoint it either. It used to really bother me that there wasnt some daily HN thread about how amazingly-coherent the .NET stack is.

Over time, I have grown to accept this low-key path is a major competitive advantage that I have over my peers. Being able to tolerate boring, slow-moving technology platforms also allows for more time to think about solving real problems. If the ground isn't constantly shifting out from underneath you, there is a lot more time to ponder about the actual business that you are going to build on top of it.

If I had to make a wild guess, I would say that the developer community has a bi-modal distribution, and the "shiny" mode dominates social media. The "serious business" mode is too busy to fuck off on the internet most days, so you don't hear about their wins as often.