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Comment by duxup | Hacker News Reader

Yeah the barrier to entry with HTML/JS is so low for anyone to make a thing that the whole world can see and frankly ... that's kinda awesome.

From there you can just be a simple site or scale up to some really impressive applications with a TON of free resources available on the internet. That's pretty amazing IMO.

As a webdev who has been dipping my toes into C#... I fire up a new command line application in VS and the fans on my laptop take off and there's just a lot of boilerplate ... come on man.

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But your C# application is debuggable, unlike those "impressive applications" written in JavaScript with thousands of async callbacks so you have no idea where the originating problematic call came from in your minified JavaScript, and even if you find it you still have to deal with the minified code that is unreadable.

What boilerplate are you talking about in C#? If you think that's bad, you should try something like C++ (although it's got far better in recent years), and I say this as a fan of C++.

C# is compiled, JavaScript is not. Your C# application will involve high CPU to compile ONCE but forevermore require half the resources of interpreted JavaScript in webpages, which need to be interpreted again and again and again.

This is an issue that is worth bearing in mind for energy usage, and has a significant impact on our future if we just defer to "easy to write, expensive to run" web languages.

I'd say C# is easier to write than JavaScript and is easier to debug for the most part.

I get the differences, I'm not making an argument for any single language to be dominant or anything.

I'm not learning C# because I think it is bad ;)

As for debuggable, I'm not sure I know enough about C# to comment on that but I find JavaScript ... "debuggable".

Somethings that's going to impress you down the line with C# debugging are using parallel stack views to debug multi threaded apps (without this could be significantly harder), remote debugging (sometimes you simply can't debug your application due to practical issues like may be your app interfaces with an expensive or impossible to deploy in your dev machine to debug with it), the watch feature in the debugger that allows you to debug complex linq queries and even expression trees on the fly and debugging external assemblies by attaching debuggers. VS is heavy on resources, but it delivers value unlike a gazillion of JS apps.

I do agree that debugging async JS code is tricky depending on how your calls are structured. However, JavaScript is definitely debuggable. Stepping through minified code is a solved problem thanks to sourcemaps.

Now with Quarkus on JVM (and to some degree also Asp.NET) the compiled languages has become so lightweight that I'm feeling the last reasons that existed for using problematic languages like PHP, Javascript and Python are disappearing.

They'll hopefully be restricted to small niches were they won't do much harm :-)

I realize this might be annoying but I'm not trying to annoy anyone, I'm trying to get a point through.

(And yes, I do have some experience here, I was significantly better and more productive with both JS, PHP and Python before I really learned Java.)

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