Milestone: Half a million downloads for VideoLAN packages in the .NET ecosystem • Hacker News Board

Re: Milestone: Half a million downloads for VideoLAN packages in the .NET ecosystem

#11

Post by GiorgioG » Wed, Jan 13, 2021, 1:20 PM UTC

davidhyde wrote: post #3

It’s nice to see .NET get some coverage now and again. It’s not regarded as the cool kid on the block but it just continues its quiet steady climb in ergonomics and performance year on year. I find c# to be a great language to build very large corporate applications in. I’ve never spotted an instance where something has been rewritten in a different language because c# was lacking in some way. Maybe it’s because the…

For whatever it's worth, I've been a .NET developer since 2001 when I was finishing up college. I've also dabbled in Java, and some other languages here and there for one-off work and side-work projects. I haven't found anything to match C# & .NET's productivity. I gravitate towards strongly-typed languages which I know excludes a large swath of productive languages.

.NET Core is fantastic. I recently bought an M1 Macbook Air (which I really hadn't wanted to do but my Intel Macbook died and I wasn't about to buy another Intel Mac given they are being phased out.) There's one issue in that debugging is broken at the moment, but it's being addressed by Apple/MS. Docker (M1 Preview) works great.

If you've never given .NET a shot because you weren't/aren't a fan of Microsoft/Windows - I recommend you give it try, you might be pleasantly surprised.

Re: Milestone: Half a million downloads for VideoLAN packages in the .NET ecosystem

#12

Post by moron4hire » Wed, Jan 13, 2021, 1:21 PM UTC

martinald wrote: post #4

davidhyde wrote: post #3

It’s nice to see .NET get some coverage now and again. It’s not regarded as the cool kid on the block but it just continues its quiet steady climb in ergonomics and performance year on year. I find c# to be a great language to build very large corporate applications in. I’ve never spotted an instance where something has been rewritten in a different language because c# was lacking in some way. Maybe it’s because the…

Agreed, and after a shakey start .NET Core is really delivering. It's trivial now to use any CI to build docker images of .NET core apps and deploy like any other docker container. Performance is great and I'm a huge fan of the big stdlib, which means less fragmentation and churn relying on packages for quite basic behaviour. The only thing I'm not entirely sure about is the recent direction of C# to add loads and lo…

To the contrary, I think it makes the code easier to understand. The syntactic sugar that gets added to C# is almost universally driven through studying extant usage and codifying common patterns. Instead of jumping through flaming hoops of boilerplate code to make, say, asynchronous network requests work, there is now a specific syntax for sequencing asynchronous calls that keeps related code more closely related in the source.

Specific syntax for patterns makes intention more clear, and shifts responsibility for getting it right from the developer to the compiler.

Re: Milestone: Half a million downloads for VideoLAN packages in the .NET ecosystem

#13

Post by dmitryminkovsky » Wed, Jan 13, 2021, 1:22 PM UTC

dcveloper wrote: post #10

Is there a decent Modern C# tutorial or book? I learned it in early 2000's, which was lacking many the new features and syntax improvements.

The official "Programming Guide" is very nice: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/csharp/programming-g.... The docs in general are quite good.

Re: Milestone: Half a million downloads for VideoLAN packages in the .NET ecosystem

#14

Post by dmitryminkovsky » Wed, Jan 13, 2021, 1:25 PM UTC

Knave130121 wrote: post #7

davidhyde wrote: post #3

It’s nice to see .NET get some coverage now and again. It’s not regarded as the cool kid on the block but it just continues its quiet steady climb in ergonomics and performance year on year. I find c# to be a great language to build very large corporate applications in. I’ve never spotted an instance where something has been rewritten in a different language because c# was lacking in some way. Maybe it’s because the…

> I’ve never spotted an instance where something has been rewritten in a different language because c# was lacking in some way. Yes, that is what killed F# effectively - on top of not having any killer frameworks. Though to be fair even Scala is dead. Making a language popular is tough.

FWIW I keep hearing about F# all the time. From where I sit, there is still a lot of enthusiasm around it. It does not seem dead at all. Is there not a lot of interop between F# and C#/dotnet?

Re: Milestone: Half a million downloads for VideoLAN packages in the .NET ecosystem

#15

Post by GiorgioG » Wed, Jan 13, 2021, 1:25 PM UTC

dcveloper wrote: post #10

Is there a decent Modern C# tutorial or book? I learned it in early 2000's, which was lacking many the new features and syntax improvements.

There's plenty of online resources to learn C#, starting with https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/learn/dotnet/

If you'd rather have a book, and enjoy the Head First series, the 4th edition of Head First C# will be released on the 26th: https://www.amazon.com/Head-First-Learners-Real-World-Progra...

Re: Milestone: Half a million downloads for VideoLAN packages in the .NET ecosystem

#16

Post by atraac » Wed, Jan 13, 2021, 1:25 PM UTC

dcveloper wrote: post #10

Is there a decent Modern C# tutorial or book? I learned it in early 2000's, which was lacking many the new features and syntax improvements.

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/csharp/tutorials/ Has a pretty decent set of tutorials and docs, from basics of the language to nice descriptions of new features like record types or new nullable reference type approach. Not sure about any books, I strongly prefer to just read through 'What's new in C# X' articles every time a new version comes out.

Re: Milestone: Half a million downloads for VideoLAN packages in the .NET ecosystem

#17

Post by deskamess » Wed, Jan 13, 2021, 1:39 PM UTC

martinald wrote: post #4

davidhyde wrote: post #3

It’s nice to see .NET get some coverage now and again. It’s not regarded as the cool kid on the block but it just continues its quiet steady climb in ergonomics and performance year on year. I find c# to be a great language to build very large corporate applications in. I’ve never spotted an instance where something has been rewritten in a different language because c# was lacking in some way. Maybe it’s because the…

Agreed, and after a shakey start .NET Core is really delivering. It's trivial now to use any CI to build docker images of .NET core apps and deploy like any other docker container. Performance is great and I'm a huge fan of the big stdlib, which means less fragmentation and churn relying on packages for quite basic behaviour. The only thing I'm not entirely sure about is the recent direction of C# to add loads and lo…

Do you have any pointers on a gentle introduction to docker and kubernetes in the .net world? Most of the docs seem to be tuned to Linux ecosystems... which makes sense given the heritage.

Re: Milestone: Half a million downloads for VideoLAN packages in the .NET ecosystem

#18

Post by niclo » Wed, Jan 13, 2021, 1:41 PM UTC

dcveloper wrote: post #10

Is there a decent Modern C# tutorial or book? I learned it in early 2000's, which was lacking many the new features and syntax improvements.

C# in Depth does exactly what you need, starts from C# 2.0 and cover all new features added in newer versions. https://www.manning.com/books/c-sharp-in-depth-fourth-editio...

Re: Milestone: Half a million downloads for VideoLAN packages in the .NET ecosystem

#19

Post by sideeffffect » Wed, Jan 13, 2021, 1:44 PM UTC

Knave130121 wrote: post #7

davidhyde wrote: post #3

It’s nice to see .NET get some coverage now and again. It’s not regarded as the cool kid on the block but it just continues its quiet steady climb in ergonomics and performance year on year. I find c# to be a great language to build very large corporate applications in. I’ve never spotted an instance where something has been rewritten in a different language because c# was lacking in some way. Maybe it’s because the…

> I’ve never spotted an instance where something has been rewritten in a different language because c# was lacking in some way. Yes, that is what killed F# effectively - on top of not having any killer frameworks. Though to be fair even Scala is dead. Making a language popular is tough.

> that is what killed F# effectively

F# has been an unwanted child of Microsoft, it actually adopted the language from Microsoft Research. As a language, F# is _very_ good (although not as good as the original OCaml, whose features had to be cut to be able to run on CLR). It's just not first-class citizen, so not everything may work with F#. And F#'s own development and features are blocked on CLR -- instead of F# charting its own path, each feature first has to be available for C#/CLR and only then will F# developers implement it (higher-kinded types are just one example).

But it's still much more pleasant "syntactic sugar to write the CIL bytecode" than C# can ever be.

> even Scala is dead

I beg to differ! Thankfully, Scala is very much not dead. Scala 3 is around the corner, with many more features and, even more importantly, several simplifications. And the community is also much larger compared to F# (or any other ML language, like Haskell). Innovation also takes place in the realm of libraries, like ZIO for example.

Re: Milestone: Half a million downloads for VideoLAN packages in the .NET ecosystem

#20

Post by svnpenn » Wed, Jan 13, 2021, 1:52 PM UTC

davidhyde wrote: post #3

It’s nice to see .NET get some coverage now and again. It’s not regarded as the cool kid on the block but it just continues its quiet steady climb in ergonomics and performance year on year. I find c# to be a great language to build very large corporate applications in. I’ve never spotted an instance where something has been rewritten in a different language because c# was lacking in some way. Maybe it’s because the…

I stopped using it recently, as I found out Microsoft still isnt serious when it comes to privacy. The DotNet tool currently silently checks for updates, without any way to opt out:

https://github.com/dotnet/templating/issues/2739