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Comment by solarkraft | Hacker News Reader

What the .NET team does on the technical side is almost universally wonderful. They've (ironically?) been a bit more successful than the Java folks at establishing multiple serious languages of different kinds running on and interoperating via the same runtime.

But it's still a Microsoft project and their sword keeps looming over its head. There have been some heavy-handed anti-developer choices in the past and one can safely assume that that has been their EEE-genes kicking in and it will probably not get better, but worse, the more they build up a community they feel they have (or should have) control over.

Wouldn't want to dive into that pool.

.NET is only as good as the parts Microsoft doesn't have too much control over and that doesn't even include the VSCode extension (or VSCode itself - Use VSCodium and you'll see).

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> bit more successful than the Java folks at establishing multiple serious languages of different kinds running on and interoperating via the same runtime

But there was plenty of serious alternative languages running on the JVM? Scala, Kotlin, Clojure. All of which have more adoption than F#.

> They've (ironically?) been a bit more successful than the Java folks at establishing multiple serious languages of different kinds running on and interoperating via the same runtime.

Can you explain more? I'm less familiar with the .net side of things.

not OP, but I'd guess they are referring to F# and C# interoperability. It's trivial to call into each other from within the same project. I'm not as familiar with this on the JVM side myself. How easy/common is it to have multi-language projects? Because in .NET it's very common to have C# interface to F# projects and vice versa with minimal work.

It’s extremely easy. I have no idea what OP is talking about. I currently work on a mixed scala/java project. It’s also one of the biggest features of Kotlin, interoperability is seamless.

I regularly program in both Scala/Java and F#/C#. Interoperability in both is excellent. But I would not call it “trivial” in the Scala/Java case. Calling Scala code from Java is occasionally a pain (the converse is easy); however I don’t think I’ve ever had an issue calling F# code from C#. I think most of the friction wrt Scala lies in the fact that Scala reinvented the wheel in several places (eg collections; “operator overloading”) which are not obvious to use in Java.

Of course. But that isn’t the fault of the JVM or Oracle. That’s the language designers that made Scala. Look at Kotlins interop. It is rather seamless.

It kind of is because .NET CLI includes more stuff to facilitate the interop (eg. operator overloading, reified generics, value types). It limits your choices when implementing languages on top but it then makes it usable from different languages.

Have you looked at Google recently or Oracle for the entirety of its history?

makes me remember about that meme where it depicts microsoft as an org with many divisions pointing guns at each other. devdiv is the good guys while sales dept. is the hated one.

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