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

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

#71

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

dmarlow wrote: post #69

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...

Yes, seriously.

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

#72

Post by cm2187 » Sun, Jun 23, 2019, 10:29 PM UTC

fj39dkf wrote: post #68

cm2187 wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

No I believe a company can use it up to 5 developpers. Which should cover the vast majority of start ups. Then you can buy a pro license for $500 which isn't that expensive if you have the financing for more than 5 devs.

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

#73

Post by whycombagator » Sun, Jun 23, 2019, 10:53 PM UTC

dmarlow wrote: post #69

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...

I thought it was universal knowledge that everyone involved/working with the Microsoft ecosystem was automatically a bad engineer?

Short list of awful engineers:

Jon Skeet, Marc Gravell, Darin Dimitrov, Gordon Linoff, Hans Passant, Schabse Laks, Nick Craver, Jared Par, Eric Lippert, Anders Hejlsberg, etc.

Good engineers also actively avoid using Stack Overflow - as it's based on Microsoft tech and good engineers want nothing to do with Microsoft.

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

#74

Post by jrs235 » Sun, Jun 23, 2019, 11:19 PM UTC

navd wrote: post #6

As someone who has done a lot of work with .NET in a past life, I think the main reason that more startups aren't using it are for culture reasons. .NET's move into open source is fairly recent and I'd expect more startups to use it (if it fits) in the future. Most startups are trying to build products with a low budget overhead and previously that was a lot harder to do in the .NET ecosystem.

I think it's because the standard/native database backend is SQL Server which costs money. Yes, you can easily develop against other RDBMS but most .NET shops stick with a pure Microsoft WISC stack.

Windows

IIS (Internet Information Services)

SQL Server

C#

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

#75

Post by nunez » Mon, Jun 24, 2019, 12:24 AM UTC

(Perceived) Licensing costs and misunderstandings around .NET being open source now. Also, Python is generally-easier to get started with (good for cash-strapped startups; labor is cheaper) and can go really far

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

#76

Post by [deleted] » Mon, Jun 24, 2019, 12:25 AM 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…

[deleted]

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

#77

Post by nunez » Mon, Jun 24, 2019, 12:27 AM 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 SRE'd there for a bit and remember when .NET Core was starting up. I'm glad that the momentum stuck; it's really good!

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

#78

Post by dmarlow » Mon, Jun 24, 2019, 12:49 AM UTC

fj39dkf wrote: post #71

dmarlow wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"good engineers simply want nothing to do with the Microsoft ecosystem" Seriously? I guess the whole swath of .NET developers aren't good engineers...

Yes, seriously.

Care to elaborate? You already throw around blanket statements, it's not enough to just say "yes". What's your rationale?

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

#79

Post by lostmsu » Mon, Jun 24, 2019, 4:40 AM UTC

mruts wrote: post #24

mdorazio wrote: post #21

1) As others have mentioned, .NET has a legacy of being expensive and closed, even if that isn't really true anymore. 2) .NET isn't really taught in college classes, and a lot of startup devs come more or less right out of college, using whatever stuff they learned as a basis. 3) .NET isn't sexy in a cultural sense. It doesn't have a shiny new flavor of the week framework, compiler, library, or whatever for everyone…

F# seems pretty sexy to me.

Even C# does at the moment. Most languages are still playing catch-up on either async or generics.

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

#80

Post by nurettin » Mon, Jun 24, 2019, 5:08 AM UTC

where I come from, .net actually hurt the startup scene because every college graduate thought that programming meant starting up VS, MSSQL and building some forms and tables.

Backwards education meant that messaging was forms and tables, constraint programming was forms and tables, state machines were forms and tables and people came up with very stupid ideas like polling tables instead of using event queues on top of which entire businesses ran.