[sytelus]

Lot of this is historical. When .Net first came out Microsoft projected it as enterprise platform specifically designed for Windows developers. This immediately ticks off any academics who want to use it for classroom or anyone who wants to do cross platform open source projects.

Even as Mono came out later, backing for it has been lacking and nobody knew if it would just die out in long run or would get killed if it ever became too popular.

The result is that most people who come out of college have been using Python/Java/Ruby for class work and then use it to build open source eco-system. This feeds on to itself and before you know now most important open source libraries are built using non-Microsoft platform.

Even though on technical (and now even political) merit C# is richer language miles ahead of Java and .Net CLR is fantastically advanced than almost anything else, there are simply many more people churning out of colleges familiar with Java instead of C#.

Over time, this accumulates and produces laughable outcome where people seem to prefer something as despising as Oracle owned product rather than much-lesser-evil Microsoft.

For languages other than Java, such as Python or Ruby, C# is actually too verbose and even lacked functional features initially. When functional features arrived, they were incremental and more as after-thought. So there was reasonable basis to reject it on that ground. I would say Go has fan base but is more comparable to C# 2.0 than C# 6.0. Some cling to few innovative features in Go and less verbousness while confusing its lack of features as "simplicity" but overall it still has miles to go.