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After a long, intentional break break from the Microsoft ecosystem (more on this below), I recently kicked off a side project and was faced with the tech stack decision. After agonizing over Python vs Elixir, I landed on C#, unexpectedly. Reasons: static + strong typing is better for long-term maintenance IMO, extensive core library, solid database management, LINQ, excellent IDE, cross-platform support. The stack is ASP.NET Core with .NET 6 on the backend, React on the frontend, Postgres as the database. Not in production yet, but planning to make a lot of use of AWS, particularly Lambda. I'm loving it, feeling very productive and trying to take advantage of many of the new language and framework features. The biggest downside I've run into is that so much of the documentation and online material is geared towards older versions and older patterns. It makes sense given .NET's long history, but it's definitely been a journey trying to figure out modern best practices without ending up in an overarchitected mess (repository pattern everywhere!). The other thing I would say about C# is that I would never again interview with it, unless it was for a .NET position specifically. All the typing benefits work against it in a timed interview environment. Long time ago I picked Python up for interviews specifically and it was a much better tool for the "job". Now for some context. I developed in .NET exclusively for ten years, from 1.1 to 3.5. The development environment was great, but over time the Microsoft ecosystem began to feel stifling. Everything had to be done the Microsoft way, if you step off the rails, you'd be in a world of pain. It was a mega monoculture spanning the entire stack, with high tolerance for throwing away previous standards (so much churn with Webforms/MVC, LinqToSQL/various Entity Framework versions, all the WPF/WCF stuff, and I'm sure much more since then). In the mean time the open-source world was moving fast, developing new patterns and technologies, with Microsoft attempting to follow, slowly. I left the ecosystem in 2014 vowing never to return. Yet... the .NET Core cross-platform push intrigued me and the ability to write C# purely for backend APIs that can be deployed outside of Windows felt like a win-win. Time will tell, but so far so good. |