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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."
It depends what the goals were.
If they wanted to completely depose Java then no, Java is still there.
If they wanted to introduce a Windows-centric alternative to re-invigorate desktop development and replace the horrors of C++ and VB with something with more modern and useful layers of abstraction and code checking that were already in Java (typed delegates, generic types, garbage collection, etc) then it seems to have done all right.
If they wanted to tear the OSS world in two with arguments over whether it .Net "teh evilz" or not then that'd be a definite yes, even thought more and more patent covenants are coming in to cover Mono (despite the fact that patent covenants shouldn't even be necessary if the legal system was sensible enough not to allow the patenting of software).
I was initially excited by .net when it was first released and have preferred it over Java, which as a language seemed to have stagnate. Now, I am finding C# quite a disappointment with Microsoft not investing the time and energy to ensure the features they add to the language are polished:
* Adding extension methods without also adding extension properties
* Refusing to implementing covariant return types
* Adding type inference, but disallowing it for class method return types
As so forth. Microsoft simply doesn't have the discipline to finish any feature addition to the language before moving to the next.
That doesn't mean I prefer Java either. I only use Java and C# at work out of necessity.
My language of choice is now Scala.
I think the register is oversimplifying here. PHP, Ruby on Rails, Python, Scala... Sure Java is a complicated beast and it has become more and more difficult to sell to new customers, but .NET is not the only one eating Java's pie.
Now, I wonder: how much .NET customers have found out they overpaid for a .NET application when they could have done as good with an X language alternative?
The interesting thing was that Sun used WORA as a surrogate argument to accept the validity of virtual machines. It's hard to imagine now, but there was a time when VMs were treated with scepticism or outright hostility by most programmers.
These days it's hard to imagine creating a programming language that wouldn't adopt a VM of some kind.
Neither the CLR or the JVM truly enable WORA, but it doesn't matter. We have learned that VMs have a value to a programming language *far* beyond that rather limited concern.
The answer is, as always, it depends.
If you expected cure for cancer, it failed miserably.
However, if you were involved with any of the likes of MFC, ATL, Visual Basic 6 and bellow, DAO, Interop & COM (to name just a few), it is to be regarded as the second coming of Christ.
"Blah blah blah." - [citation needed]
We use both heavily in our enterprise. I tend to lean toward Java because of the wide spread use across platforms. But I agree that the underlying framework of Java is ridiculously complex. We spend a huge amount of time dealing with the JRE rather than writing and supporting actual code.
.net, visual studio, MSSQL, AD, and IIS are a seriously tight integrated platform. I've seen even our most junior devs author amazing sites using the pure Microsoft tools.
.net framework methodology. If they could pull that off Java would really start to storm our environments.
On the other hand,
Overall, I'd say I'm on the fence. I wish Sun would remove head from ass and get the JRE to a better versioning system that allows old apps to keep running along with new apps, similar to the
Well of course you will. The projects on those sites are looking for cheap implementation and damn any sort of quality or maintainability. The register didn't look at those sorts of sites, they looked at recruiting sites instead, the ones businesses use. Using the slime pool that is the "Write me a twitter clone for $100" sites to say LAMP is the most popular in businesses is laughable.
Of course their reasons for doing it are not benevolent, they want software designed for Windows so that users want to use Windows. Regardless, they produce extremely slick dev tools because of it. Often the things maligned by self proclaimed "real" programmers are actually quite useful dev tools in the right situations.
Visual Basic is a good example, all sorts of geeks liked to hate on VB as being stupid. While they were on to something in that VB wasn't powerful like C/C++, they missed that the reason was that VB was a managed language back before such a thing was popular. It allowed you to easily churn out UIs and things like that with minimal effort and without the need to check for the gotchas you got with something like C. Hence it was quite popular.
What MS has done real well is realized that most developers out there are NOT the hard core "Give me a text editor or give me death!" types. They are people in business trying to get something done, and get it done with minimal fuss and hassle. They also likely have to put up with management idiots who want to change the requirements every 5 minutes and thus being able to rapidly change the software is a benefit.
They really do seem to be a company that is in touch with what developers want.
Powershell is pervasive now. Every MS product now has powershell hooks. Most command-line utilities are being folded into Powershell extensions. While the language itself is not to my taste(I much prefer the *nix shells still), it's a big improvement alright.
Java only has lost the war if you thing the entire world runs on windows and develops for Windows only, sorry it is like that!
I work in banking environments where the language is very strong, the reason simply is you develop on windows, then deploy on Unix and the deployment scales up to the big irons from IBM if you need to!
All I can see on C# side for now is that it has gotten the ground that VB and ASP had before, that is the market of develop for windows deploy on windows. Ok this is quite a big market but this is only one part of the picture.
Now with Android we also have a serious push of java being a very popular platform programming language for mobile phones again instead of the trash of J2ME.
It is not branded java but the Dalvik VM has clearly java roots!
As I said C# has mostly gathered the ground which was occupied by Microsoft before anyway, quite a big ground but territory java never had.
Although Java-the-language has stagnated a bit (I don't know if JDK 7 will ever be complete, due to all the feature cramming), but there's been a lot of activity during the past few years on other languages that run on Java-the-platform. Groovy and Rhino (Javascript) have been available for the JVM for quite a while. JRuby is actually faster than "native" Ruby for a lot of real-world applications. The Lisp-like Clojure language has a lot of fans. IMO, Scala is the most interesting out of all of these, with a very sophisticated type system, as well as functional features that the cool OCaml and Haskell kids seem to love.
All those third-party JVM-hosted languages have two big problems hampering their adoption.
The first one is lack of proper IDE support. And the problem with this target is that it shifts constantly - ten years ago we had much less than we have today. Think about how many automated Java refactorings a typical Java IDE offers today. Then there are things like code pattern search in IDEA. And so on... the challenge of making a new language is making all the tooling for it as well, and it inevitably competes with feature-rich and mature solutions that already exist for Java.
The second problem, which is probably even bigger, is the lack of a big corporate backer. With Java, there's Sun and Google. With C#, there's Microsoft. With C++, there are way too many to list - Intel, IBM, Apple, Sun, Google, Microsoft all have major stakes in it, and consequently work on language design together in the ISO committee. But something like Scala? What's the guarantee that it will be around tomorrow?
Which is a real pity, to be honest. Scala is an awesome language, probably the perfect in its (pragmatical hybrid OO/FP) niche. If e.g. Google were to seriously back it, it would really help its adoption. Unfortunately, it doesn't look like it's happening.
In contrast, the adoption drive behind F# (yes, there are fairly large companies out there using F# in production code) is largely because of Microsoft backing it, officially supporting it as part of VS, and so on - which is why I suspect it will keep growing.