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Comment by potta_coffee | Hacker News Reader

I landed on a team that does .NET. They're using the latest dotnetcore stuff. I've worked in various frameworks in many different languages and I can say that from my perspective, the Microsoft ecosystem is the most nihilistic, un-fun, fiddly environment I've ever had to use. The guys that always try to sell it to me never seem to have much exposure to anything else.

I can admit that there are different ways of thinking and different styles for different people and teams and that .NET is a valid choice, and lots of decent software is built with it. But I've chosen to stay away.

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What is the exact opposite then? What is "fun" these days? :) Am I boring? :)

I have done a lot of stuff in a lot of languages/frameworks, from electronics to desktop applications to websites and server stuff. Never cared that much about specific technology. It's fine if it gets stuff done is my motto, but I must admit that .NET is my go-to technology. Everything else I touch seems like a huge mess in terms of design, documentation, tools etc. I'm not saying that .NET is perfect, but at least someone spend some time on design before it's release and it has certain consistency that other projects rarely have.

Not that I need to have fun but .NET is the opposite of fun to me, in other words, painful. I'd rather not split hairs on what's right or wrong but the maximal OOP style of .NET's structure is just not for me. There's so much boilerplate that I don't need in other frameworks, and from what I've experienced, I'd need to buy in completely to the tooling and ecosystem to become productive, which means Visual Studio or similar IDE. In terms of functionality, the project I was last contributing to in .NET would have been much smaller and simpler in Go, Python or Javascript for the same set of features. I've built so many CRUD apps and APIs now that I can whip out these kinds of projects quickly with nothing more than a text editor. I just can't see any upsides for me to jump into .NET now.

FWIW, I did try to give it a shot with an open mind, but shortly after that project I decided I'm not accepting any more .NET work.

>the maximal OOP style of .NET's structure is just not for me

You can use C# .NET in a simple, non OOP way.

You can use F# in a functionaly style.

Nobody forces OOP upon you.

If I were working by myself on a project, I could make those choices. Unfortunately it's not the common approach to take, nor is it really the documented / recommended way.

In the end isn't the biggest difference the knowledge and experiences we have gathered over the years? I have no problem writing C# code on Raspberry Pi using terminal and simple nano editor, but I would have to google quite a bit if I was supposed to do the same stuff in Python, JavaScript or C++.

I use these languages every now and then, I just don't have the deep knowledge required to do everything effortlessly and I get frustated by things that people accepted as "the norm" on those platforms. Like the whole depencdecy stuff and node_modules blackhole in node.js, string handling in C++, weird Python syntax etc. People used to these platforms probably don't have an issue with any of this and accept it as a trade-off for some other amazing stuff on that platform that I don't know about and don't appreciate.

But ".NET core" is "dead". The latest is .NET 5 or even .NET 6 (bleeding edge).

I left that team a couple of months ago but keeping all the different iterations of .NET separate is one of my gripes. The documentation is some of the worst I've ever seen and I simply have no patience for it when I have so many other tools that I can use to get the job done with less friction.

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