Has a Decade of .NET Delivered On Microsoft's Promises?

cyclocommuter writes with this snippet from The Register's assessment of whether Microsoft's .NET framework has been a success: "If the goal of .NET was to see off Java, it was at least partially successful. Java did not die, but enterprise Java became mired in complexity, making .NET an easy sell as a more productive alternative. C# has steadily grown in popularity, and is now the first choice for most Windows development. ASP.NET has been a popular business web framework. The common language runtime has proved robust and flexible. ... Job trend figures here show steadily increasing demand for C#, which is now mentioned in around 32 per cent of UK IT programming vacancies, ahead of Java at 26 per cent."

Comments

I think they made a small mistake.

[Burnhard]

The article says that demand for c# is around 32%, but it should also add in the demand for vb.net, which is less but should be added to the total, as it is in use. In my view, the language features, excellent development environment and comprehensive libraries make .NET a win for most LOB applications - which is the vast majority of all PC applications in use at the moment.

Re:Java too complex

[minginqunt]

As a professional Java programmer, I've watched as Java-the-language has stagnated. Java-the-platform has only thrived thanks to Open Source, and no thanks to the sclerotic Java Community Process and an ineffectual steward in Sun Microsystems.

Java programmers have watched in horror as C# gained fully reified generics, lambdas and closures, arbitrary monadic comprehensions and Hindley-Milner type inference, whilst we've only grudgingly been allowed a broken generics model whilst Sun spent years rejecting and rewriting closure proposals that are still 1-2 years away from adoption.

C# is thriving because it has a benevolent dictator in the form of Anders Hjelberg. Java the language is a stagnant mess.

Re:Java too complex

[Anpheus]

Moreover, Microsoft seems to earnestly care about putting the geekiest of the geeks in charge of their language development. They have quite a few functional programmers who have a significant say in the future of languages like F#, and continue to produce great libraries for the CLR.

And now of course, IronPython is a dream scripting language that's incredibly easy to host and entirely open source to boot.

I think people unnecessarily mock Ballmer for "Developers, developers, developers!" He was right. It worked, and Java lost, despite having done so many things right first, and having nailed cross-platform application and service design. Or at least, Java is in the process of losing.

Re:Asp.Net is NOT a 'popular' business framework.

[bit trollent]

Where I live, on Dice.com there are 74 open ASP.NET, and 17 open PHP jobs.

You are totally talking out of your ass. I really hope you understand the irony of starting with, "please dont bullcrap if you are not in industry".

I may not be in the dumb, arrogant PHP developer industry, but I can assure you that I am in the industry. There is a good chance that if you haven't used a website that I helped develop, you have at least used one that my company has. Where I work, we use ASP.NET (Primarily .NET) and Java, but not PHP.

But hey, don't let that discourage you the next time you want to post an uninformed and totally inaccurate rant about PHP and how you are in the industry but nobody else is...

Re:Java too complex

[Hurricane78]

Yet another comment by someone who thinks Java is “applets in my browser”.

Java is THE dominant language for mobile phone development (96% of all phones support it, the other 4% allow it with a little precompiler), and “enterprise” server development (where is is the fastest mainstream non-C language, except for [maybe] OCaml/Haskell).

Java is not only going strong, with no decline in sight. It is dominant in many sectors.