I (and countless others I know) simply refuse to learn/use a language that locks you in an ecosystem. I haven’t taken Kotlin, C# or any of the Apple proprietary tech jobs and never will.

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jeroenhd 2 months ago | parent | next [-]

Kotlin may have been relatively IDE-locked without a proper LSP being available, but C# is cross-platform in terms of both editors and runtimes (assuming you're not targeting Windows' .NET stack).

At this point I wouldn't consider it any more or less proprietary than any other Microsoft language, like TypeScript for instance.

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exyi 2 months ago | parent | next [-]

Kotlin did not have open LSP, C# still does not have an open debugger.

The C# VSCode extension works in Microsoft's build of VSCode, not when someone else forks it and builds it themselves.

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jeroenhd 2 months ago | parent | next [-]

The debugger is proprietary but still works cross-platform. I don't know how Jetbrains does C# debugging in Rider exactly, but that shows that you don't have to use VS (Code) to do C# development if you don't want to.

Thanks to Samsung of all companies, there's an open source C# debugger on GitHub (https://github.com/Samsung/netcoredbg). That seems to be the basis of the open source C# extension's debugging capabilities: https://open-vsx.org/extension/muhammad-sammy/csharp

The VSCodium C# community wants Microsoft to open source their debugger instead of having to maintain an open source version themselves, but that doesn't mean you need to use Microsoft's open source version. If anything, this forceful separation makes it so that there never will be only one implementation (like there is for languages like Rust which have always been open and therefore only have one way of doing things).

	▲	exyi 2 months ago \| parent [-]
		I know about netcoredbg, but I did not have much success using it. If we count this as the C# debugger, then the tooling quality is not comparable to other mainstream languages like Scala, D or Julia. JetBrains have their own closed debugger, which doesn't really help. Since Rust is native code, you can use pretty much any debugger for it, there is definitely not a single implementation. Yes, Rust has a single compiler, but does C# have any other compiler than Microsoft's Roslyn? (I don't think this is a problem, though)

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martypitt 2 months ago | parent | prev [-]

Kotlin has had an OSS (MIT) Language Server for years. It's written and maintained by the community - but isn't that exactly the point of open source?

[0]: https://github.com/fwcd/kotlin-language-server

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cess11 2 months ago | parent | prev [-]

C# is partially cross-platform. Might be fine for web applications, but e.g. GUI frameworks aren't as cross in practice as they make it out to be, which I've wasted tens of hours figuring out before going back to Java and Racket.

The nice language on the CLR, F#, also doesn't seem to be very well liked by MICROS~1 anymore.

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jeroenhd 2 months ago | parent [-]

MAUI is cross platform for every platform most businesses care about (mobile+Windows+macOS). For the rest, there's Avalonia (and a bunch of alternatives, but Avalonia comes closest to Microsoft's systems I think).

You won't be writing visual bootloaders in plain C# any time soon, but the GUI side of C# is fine

	▲	cess11 2 months ago \| parent [-]
		Avalonia wasted most of the time I spent.

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9cb14c1ec0 2 months ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Every language has its ecosystem. I don't know why being locked into the Java or C# ecosystem is any worse than, say Python or Go. And I say that as someone who has used all of these languages.

	▲	iLemming 2 months ago \| parent [-]
		Moreover, every programming language has its own community. With conventions, rules, style guides, code of conduct, roadmaps and mentality. With some "weird" takes and with some "pragmatic insights", with their own "rock stars" and "graybeards" to respect and follow. Each with its own unique landscape of hills to choose to die on. "Nothing's wrong with XML", "Give me JSON or death", "Fuck that, YAML all the way for me", ".yaml is dead, long live .toml!", "pfff, you mortals have no idea but EDN is way better..." — and that's just some data-representation disagreements. Once you get to actually processing the data, it gets even worse: "object-orientation is bullcrap", "oh, no, this FP shit is so hard to read for me, what's wrong with good-old 'for' loops?", "if you're not using static types, you're a bad, bad person...", "yes, these 35 libraries to run our 3-liner script are really necessary", etc. Every single programming language has its own pain points and joyful bits. That's why programming is both an amazingly gratifying and a heinously crappy trade. Do you want to age into an old, happy programmer? Avoid emotional attachment to any single programming language. Borrow good ideas from different sources, but don’t settle on a single PL, paradigm, or convention. Sure, you’ll probably end up hating each of them for different reasons, but you may find some that you don’t loathe so badly.

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sorcercode 2 months ago | parent | prev [-]

what job do you currently take?

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rochak 2 months ago | parent [-]

I work on backend (distributed systems) leveraging languages like Java, Python, Go, Ruby and TypeScript.

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TiredOfLife 2 months ago | parent [-]

What ecosystem does C# lock you in compared to Java, Python, Go, Ruby and TypeScript?

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rochak 2 months ago | parent [-]

Microsoft/Windows’s ecosystem. As an example, any general guide on the Internet or on Microsoft’s end is written assuming you are developing on and for Windows. I want to stay away from Windows as much as I possibly can but it just isn’t possible. That’s not the case with the other languages/ecosystems I mentioned.

	▲	TiredOfLife 2 months ago \| parent \| next [-]
		https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/training/modules/dotnet-de... Like first result searching for .net brings you to this microsoft tutorial. Instruction for local development start with installing sdk that immediately offers linux install instructions and vscode also with direct links to .deb or .rpm packages
	▲	iLemming 2 months ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		After college I didn't do a lot of programming for some years. But then jumped into .Net with gusto, because I carried huge respect for Anders Hejlsberg. Back in college they taught us Pascal. It's not that I'm that old, it's just because I grew up in former Soviet Union, which has been lagging for decades behind American computer landscape, some curriculums ran with a huge delay. So, because I knew Pascal well, of course I was following Anders (creator of Turbo Pascal and Delphi). Anders worked for Borland. So, just so you know, Borland was huge back in the day, they made IDEs like Borland C++Builder and such. In fact, Borland was so big, my classmate one day has shocked me by telling me that he thought that the last name of Pascal (the mathematician) was "Borland", that's how (he thought) the company got its name. Anyway, Anders left Borland and joined Microsoft and then .NET with VB and C# came out. In the beginning I was elated. After a few years building .NET apps, websites and services, I started digging for other things. Without even realizing, I slowly left the .NET behind me. Getting out, I recognized that the entire .NET stinked with an aura of some kind of "mental prison". I can't really describe the feeling now, but the entire community felt to me like needing some kind of approval all the time — from mothership company, from influencers like Scott Hanselman, from the Stack Overflow team, or some others like Pluralsight (which in the beginning was very .NET-centric). I'm sure things perhaps have changed since then for the better — Satya has implemented some company-wide revolutionary changes, yet for me personally, the appeal of writing code targeting .NET has completely dissipated. I'm honestly not missing it a bit. Just a few months of coding something different taught me far more, improved my skills, and gave me invaluable perspective that I wouldn't find if I've stayed.