[solardev]

I wouldn't say they're "good", but it's cool that they've managed to stay somewhat open at all.

In an alternate timeline, Microsoft might've won out with single vendor .NET everywhere. The DX would be better but everything would be way more closed.

[yen223]

I think openness is a must. Alternatives that were proprietary largely died out because they were proprietary. They can't survive transitions into newer platforms, like how Flash failed to make it into mobile

[dysoco]

To be fair if they had a monopoly perhaps they would have little incentive to make DX better in order to compete.

[solardev]

I don't think that's necessarily true, though. Even back in the pre .NET days, when Microsoft pretty much did have a monopoly on PC desktops, Visual Studio (not VSCode, but its full-fledged big brother) had pretty awesome DX.

And having a standard UI layer (like WinForms) made GUI development way way better for both the developer (who could drag and drop shapes and easily align frames and tabs and buttons and such instead of having to try to wrangle CSS) and the average user could have standard UI looks & feels across many different apps.

The openness of the Web led to its popularity (and my career), but then every company ended up making their code style, IDE, APIs, UI layers, etc., leading to extreme fragmentation in both DX and UX that to this day is still a mess. Of course I still prefer this over a closed Microsoft monopoly (or an Apple one), but it's certainly made for a lot of unnecessary reinventions of the wheel.