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Comment by coldtea | Hacker News Reader

The thing is, it's anything but shitty.

C# is one of the best languages out there for generic enterprise work and app development, and there's a magnigicent next gen language in F# thrown in, and a great web framework.

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I keep hearing that, as if people are trying to convince themselves. But the fact is that it just doesn't exist out in the wild like its alternatives. What's more, anybody who thinks Microsoft is embracing open source by doing this is kidding themselves. There is only one motivation behind everything Microsoft does, and it isn't bringing open source philosophy to its products. Hint: That philosophy serves to undermine Microsoft's single motivation. I'm sure this comment -- while more thorough and reasonable -- will also be downvoted into oblivion because of the fanboys in here high on their own dreams. Microsoft is not your friend.

> Microsoft is not your friend

Nor is google or Oracle. So who is? To put this in perspective you need to look at the alternatives. Getting a free (as in speech) source CLR/BCL/JIT/Compiler and a free (as in beer) IDE is pretty sweet.

Sure, you can do python or Node.js, but it's not covering all that you can do now with .NET. Only java/jvm really competes on "everything except high perf" (from enterprise to mobile to cloud etc.).

And in the java universe you may end up with Ask toolbar, Eclipse and tears on your keyboard.

> So who is?

Linus Torvalds, RMS, Guido van Rossum, and a very long list of other open source contributors who were writing open source code before it was 'hip' or good PR.

Those guys do (did) some great things. However, I wasn't asking about who was a cool developer or great OSS personality (Or a crazy person or obnoxius mailing list asshat for that matter :) )

I meant, when it comes to choosing a platform/language/IDE for enterprise dev or mobile/cloud dev, there are lots of options but most of the "big" ones also come from megacorps (Oracle, Google...)

What scared people most about .NET is usually the closed nature (will they continue to develop it? will they charge more tomorrow?) and the fact that it only runs on windows which makes it more expensive. When it's open sourced and available for other platforms, it's no worse than the alternatives in that respect.

I think people didn't trust MS because of Android patent extortion fees (which they still do BTW) and Mono was covered only partially by patent promise. I still don't know if every part of Mono is "patent promise" covered (by MS).

I don't believe MS would sue some random ISV but let's assume Google today forks Mono - will this be safe for them to use ?

"C# is one of the best languages out there for generic enterprise work and app development" - i see you have great tools if cs is soooo good.

For enterprise work I'd actually agree that nothing beats C#.

I also love Haskell, but let's be honest - it won't get me hired, or at least not here in Bulgaria.

"For enterprise work I'd actually agree that nothing beats C#." - i'm sad to read this. It's a pain to develop even a simple thing with c#/java because of the 'great' lang design and ugly tools. "I also love Haskell, but let's be honest - it won't get me hired, or at least not here in Bulgaria." - with a toy lang, nobody(if sane) will hire you.

"with a toy lang, nobody(if sane) will hire you"

C# is the "toy lang"? How old are you exactly?

I think he called Haskell that. Booo

Well, that's equally bad, just from another perspective.

As if the market demands and hirability is all that matters (and that said in a forum of hackers and entrepreneurs! Lots of which have actually businesses run on Haskell, Clojure, LISP and other "toy" languages)...

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