Ask HN: Why is .NET not popular with startups? • Hacker News Board

Re: Ask HN: Why is .NET not popular with startups?

#61

Post by mattmanser » Sun, Jun 23, 2019, 7:02 PM UTC

goto11 wrote: post #40

discreteevent wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He had even stronger opinions about Java despite Amazon and Google (not to mention many others) being built in it. I could never figure that out because he's quite insightful about a lot of other things.

I think it is hard for us language geeks to accept that language choice just doesn't matter that much.

pg's always had a touch of functional fever.

HN used to as well, every 2 or 3 years since it was started you'd have half the comments in a language discussion swearing blind that everyone was just about to switch to Lisp, then it was Erlang, then Haskell, then Scala.

Re: Ask HN: Why is .NET not popular with startups?

#62

Post by je42 » Sun, Jun 23, 2019, 7:41 PM UTC

nycdotnet wrote: post #52

We use .NET Core at Namely and we are generally super happy with it. About half of our new services are in C# with .NET core using protobufs/gRPC in Linux Docker containers on Kubernetes talking to Postgres, Redis, and Kafka; the other half are Go but otherwise same stack. That’s all free/open source stuff. .NET Core is super fast and has a generally pretty small memory footprint. It works great with our ELK stack mo…

I am curious: Why is your other half of your services in Go ? If you are happy with .Net ?

Re: Ask HN: Why is .NET not popular with startups?

#63

Post by Someone1234 » Sun, Jun 23, 2019, 7:53 PM UTC

world32 wrote: post #51

Someone1234 wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> To echo what others said... Your post doesn't do that. Most other posts name other reasons (potentially legitimate ones), your "it is expensive" justification is inaccurate and doesn't echo most posts here. > Microsoft charged money in multiple areas of the stack: the compiler (VS) cost money, the database (MS SQL Server) cost money, and the operating system (Windows licenses) cost money. The C# compiler is free an…

You are clearly very bitter about this. > The C# compiler is free and OSS. Has this always been the case? > .Net Core is available for Linux and MacOS. A quick wikipedia search shows that .Net core was first released in June 2016, that only supports the view that microsoft has been very late to the game when it comes to open source languages and frameworks. The original comment that you disagreed with says "Yes, MS l…

> You are clearly very bitter about this.

Being snarky and name calling against site guidelines. It is the first line:

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

> Has this always been the case?

Has this always been the case with Java? With C? With C++? It has been open standard since 2001 and the current compiler open source since 2014. So five or more years. Ten or more with Mono (part of .Net Core today).

> A quick wikipedia search shows that .Net core was first released in June 2016, that only supports the view that microsoft has been very late to the game when it comes to open source languages and frameworks.

.Net Core isn't the first version to be open sourced nor free.

Re: Ask HN: Why is .NET not popular with startups?

#64

Post by whb07 » Sun, Jun 23, 2019, 9:11 PM UTC

erikpt-work wrote: post #46

whb07 wrote: post #4

There has always been a dark horse OS within .NET its called F#. But what is sad about the state of the average C# dev is that when I ask them about their opinions on F#, they always respond with a "whats F#?" That's the problem with most .NET developers. They were fed straight from the MS spoon with blinders on, and never wondered what is out there. But to label oneself as a "I'm a .NET dev", and yet you don't know…

Not intending to start a flame war, just to expand my knowledge. As someone well versed in C#/VB please ELI5 why F# is so superior to it's OO cousins? Seems to me like it's actually more difficult to get to the same results with functional languages especially when C# has a lot of "functional" paradigms included?

My general point was essentially that the "average" C# dev has no clue/idea about tech so much so that they don't even know F# exists.

I'm not making any assertions about OOP vs FP. Though some claims would be that with FP it is easier to maintain an application, functions are mapped to a singular result given a specific input, and with F# its got a strong type system.

Re: Ask HN: Why is .NET not popular with startups?

#65

Post by dogma1138 » Sun, Jun 23, 2019, 9:13 PM UTC

DarkStar851 wrote: post #54

pryelluw wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It has only been open source for a relative short amount of time when compared with other technologies like Node, RoR, etc. .Net has historically cost money while providing somewhat similar features as open source competitors. Its why MS was forced into open sourcing it. They could not compete anymore.

.NET itself has always been "free" (as in beer), it's just VS they made people pay for. They've had a community edition since VS2012 at least, possibly earlier but that's as far back as my brain goes. The Community edition is pretty full-featured, it's only missing some TFS integration stuff, some test suite stuff and advanced profiling. I'd compare it to IntelliJ's free/pro model.

Before CE it was Visual Studio Express which was also pretty much the same.

Re: Ask HN: Why is .NET not popular with startups?

#66

Post by iamnothere » Sun, Jun 23, 2019, 9:26 PM UTC

mattmanser wrote: post #59

TobbenTM wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But it is free though! With .Net Core being Cross platform, I've actually yet to run it on anything else than Linux in production environments! Hosting is the same as any other technology, you just need a host to either run containers or the .Net artifacts directly. Lastly, I think it's unfair to throw SQL server into this comparison, as MySQL and PostgreSQL are perfectly supported with entity framework.

Last time I tried MySQL with the EF the performance was terrible, the EF was outputting a load of nested tables that were fine with SQL Server, but absolutely abysmal performance with MySQL. This was a while ago. Have you used this personally, and do you have any scale? As there's 'supported' and there's good.

EF is overkill for most things, like most heavyweight ORMs. Good for "line of business" apps, probably not great for most other applications. Dapper is much more performant.

Re: Ask HN: Why is .NET not popular with startups?

#67

Post by fj39dkf » Sun, Jun 23, 2019, 9:49 PM UTC

People have rightly mentioned the cost and vendor lock-in issues. The other problem is that - for whatever reason - good engineers simply want nothing to do with the Microsoft ecosystem. In this market, they have other options. So tying your infrastructure to .NET means limiting your hiring pool to mostly 9-to-5er enterprise developers who tend to fix problems by asking Microsoft to sell them the solution. Not exactly the attitude you want at a startup.

Re: Ask HN: Why is .NET not popular with startups?

#68

Post by fj39dkf » Sun, Jun 23, 2019, 10:11 PM UTC

cm2187 wrote: post #39

mola wrote: post #28

I find c# a great language, much better (more argonomic, less verbose, less 'patchy') than Java. I do believe that historically developing on .net didn't make sense for startups because of the huge licensing tax for the OS (servers and Dev stations) and developer tools. Moreover the usual bodies that preferred paying licenses for stable vendor were large, slow enterprises. This made .net appear less sexy and fashiona…

Free, community editions of visual studio have been around for a long time now and are nearly as good as the more expensive pro version. I don't think the dev station side is still true. But on the server side, Windows Server and SQL Server still cost a fortune and I believe they raised their prices recently.

For students and researchers. If you're operating a business you still have to pay for VS licenses, or violate the free license and hope you get big enough fast enough that it's not a problem.

Re: Ask HN: Why is .NET not popular with startups?

#69

Post by dmarlow » Sun, Jun 23, 2019, 10:14 PM UTC

fj39dkf wrote: post #67

People have rightly mentioned the cost and vendor lock-in issues. The other problem is that - for whatever reason - good engineers simply want nothing to do with the Microsoft ecosystem. In this market, they have other options. So tying your infrastructure to .NET means limiting your hiring pool to mostly 9-to-5er enterprise developers who tend to fix problems by asking Microsoft to sell them the solution. Not exactl…

"good engineers simply want nothing to do with the Microsoft ecosystem"

Seriously? I guess the whole swath of .NET developers aren't good engineers...

Re: Ask HN: Why is .NET not popular with startups?

#70

Post by dmarlow » Sun, Jun 23, 2019, 10:22 PM UTC

We use .NET at Degreed. I suspect a lot of startups use it, but not many compared to other startups. The problem is that's they're hard to find because they're not actively throwing it out there that they're using .NET.

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