Slashdot Mirror
Ask Slashdot: Is an Open Source .NET Up To the Job?
Rob Y. writes:
The discussion on Slashdot about Microsoft's move to open source .NET core has centered on:
1. whether this means Microsoft is no longer the enemy of the open source movement
2. if not, then does it mean Microsoft has so lost in the web server arena that it's resorting to desperate moves.
3. or nah — it's standard Microsoft operating procedure. Embrace, extend, extinguish.
What I'd like to ask is whether anybody that's not currently a .NET fan actually wants to use it? Open source or not. What is the competition? Java? PHP? Ruby? Node.js? All of the above? Anything but Microsoft? Because as an OSS advocate, I see only one serious reason to even consider using it — standardization. Any of those competing platforms could be as good or better, but the problem is: how to get a job in this industry when there are so many massively complex platforms out there. I'm still coding in C, and at 62, will probably live out my working days doing that. But I can still remember when learning a new programming language was no big deal. Even C required learning a fairly large library to make it useful, but it's nothing compared to what's out there today. And worse, jobs (and technologies) don't last like they used to. Odds are, in a few years, you'll be starting over in yet another job where they use something else.
Employers love standardization. Choosing a standard means you can't be blamed for your choice. Choosing a standard means you can recruit young, cheap developers and actually get some output from them before they move on. Or you can outsource with some hope of success (because that's what outsourcing firms do — recruit young, cheap devs and rotate them around). To me, those are red flags — not pluses at all. But they're undeniable pluses to greedy employers. Of course, there's much more to being an effective developer than knowing the platform so you can be easily slotted in to a project. But try telling that to the private equity guys running too much of the show these days.
So, assuming Microsoft is sincere about this open source move,
1. Is .NET up to the job?
2. Is there an open source choice today that's popular enough to be considered the standard that employers would like?
3. If the answer to 1 is yes and 2 is no, make the argument for avoiding .NET.
1. whether this means Microsoft is no longer the enemy of the open source movement
2. if not, then does it mean Microsoft has so lost in the web server arena that it's resorting to desperate moves.
3. or nah — it's standard Microsoft operating procedure. Embrace, extend, extinguish.
What I'd like to ask is whether anybody that's not currently a .NET fan actually wants to use it? Open source or not. What is the competition? Java? PHP? Ruby? Node.js? All of the above? Anything but Microsoft? Because as an OSS advocate, I see only one serious reason to even consider using it — standardization. Any of those competing platforms could be as good or better, but the problem is: how to get a job in this industry when there are so many massively complex platforms out there. I'm still coding in C, and at 62, will probably live out my working days doing that. But I can still remember when learning a new programming language was no big deal. Even C required learning a fairly large library to make it useful, but it's nothing compared to what's out there today. And worse, jobs (and technologies) don't last like they used to. Odds are, in a few years, you'll be starting over in yet another job where they use something else.
Employers love standardization. Choosing a standard means you can't be blamed for your choice. Choosing a standard means you can recruit young, cheap developers and actually get some output from them before they move on. Or you can outsource with some hope of success (because that's what outsourcing firms do — recruit young, cheap devs and rotate them around). To me, those are red flags — not pluses at all. But they're undeniable pluses to greedy employers. Of course, there's much more to being an effective developer than knowing the platform so you can be easily slotted in to a project. But try telling that to the private equity guys running too much of the show these days.
So, assuming Microsoft is sincere about this open source move,
1. Is .NET up to the job?
2. Is there an open source choice today that's popular enough to be considered the standard that employers would like?
3. If the answer to 1 is yes and 2 is no, make the argument for avoiding .NET.
I've been a cross-platform coder for about a decade now. I liked the ideas of Java and .NET when they came out, but they were lacking in execution. If you look at everything powering technology today: Big Data, Node.js, Android/iOS, cloud remember (Hotmail was bought by MS, originally on BSD servers) Microsoft hasn't done squat. Meanwhile MS has delivered a lot of failed tech: WinForms, Zune, Windows Phone. (I've only ever seen two people with a Windows Phone) Only the Xbox and .NET have succeeded. I would be very concerned hitching my trailer to MS. They don't do innovation anymore, they don't even do copying (embrace and extend) well.
A big .NET friend of mine has recently taken to web development. He develops on OSX, deploys to Linux (AWS). He loves how he can take one thing and just run it on another. He doesn't have to worry about putting IIS on Linux, Node works everywhere. The code he develops isn't tied to any specific OS platform. Angular is node dependent, but Knockout isn't.
And there in I think the real danger is realized. If you use .NET you are locked into MS stagnant mono-culture, and their failing culture of innovation. If you want bleeding edge, OS agnosticism, MS isn't going to deliver it. Their goal will always be to lock you into their vertical to protect their verticals.
With the very good developments in Linux and the Apple premium is gone, only organizations with legacy applications need consider any Microsoft technology.
PS. I use Qt for everything on Mobile and desktop, Node for server and Knockout/Angular for web client. There is a slight possibility that Qt's QML will work on the web. Python for anything else. This is crossplatform, and not one drop of MS. It is my speculation that MS is a wounded animal, realizing they are like Cadillac. Cadillac realized the average age of their customers were getting older, and over 60 and that market would be no longer driving in a few years. There's an exodus from MS platforms. Their new focus aims to fix this. Buyer beware. Where is the money in it for them?
Slashdot's rate-of-post filter: Preventing you from posting too many great ideas at once.
I think you missed my point, so please allow me to elaborate. For someone who wants to go from Windows to other platforms, an open-source .NET makes sense, but only if their code is already in .NET.
For people who are already using toolchains other than .NET that support their products on multiple platforms, there's no reason to switch. It's just "re-implementing the wheel" with another language.
And since the official Java implementation is open source (OpenJDK) and has been for years, why not just stick with it if you're already using it? So really, the majority of people who aren't already using .NET have no real reason to switch.
"Transparent" is a shit show that trades on every stereotype going. A man in drag is NOT a transsexual.
.NET is slowly beeing weeded out of the enterprise though and that's a trend I don't want to see diminished by devs picking up .NET because it's now "open source". It's OK to hate .NET, open source or not.
Citation please? I've been seeing a gradual increase in .NET development, And I get called frequently by headhunters looking for .NET developers despite that software development is not my primary job function.
Any insufficiently advanced magic is indistinguishable from technology.
.NET performance isn't better, I don't know where you got that from. .NET startup is better - non-Micro-Edition versions of the Java Virtual Machine load the whole Java language standard library at startup, and it's a pretty big standard library, so it is slower and uses more memory than a .NET application at startup. But the Java Virtual Machine has the HotSpot ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... ) which does runtime alteration and optimization of code. What that means is that for long-running code - which is of course the common case for web servers - the Java Virtual Machine monitors the execution profile of methods and once a method is executed around 10,000 times it will examine it and if it can find common cases or frequently used code paths it will dynamically rewrite the method or inline it to make it faster. As far as I know, .NET has nothing similar - performance never changes.
.NET supports C#, VB.net, F#, Nemerle, and a number of other languages. The Java Virtual Machine supports Java, Ruby, Python, Groovy, Scala, Clojure, Scheme (Kawa), Lisp (ABCL), Javascript, and a number of other languages.
The Java Virtual Machine is also a runtime.
And last but most importantly, it's been more than five years since I rejected Microsoft options out of hand for technical reasons. But I still reject them for ethical ones. This is a company that intentionally modified APIs to break third party applications, lied about software releases and features to hurt competitors, made business deals that are illegal under US anti-trust law with OEMs to block competition, waged countless FUD campaigns throughout its life, and wields its intellectual property resources like a weapon of mass economic destruction to squash innovative competitors. Where would the world technology industry be today if we didn't have this trillion dollar parasite doing more work than any other factor to stifle competition?
Monster:
Dice
So, ONLY on Dice and ONLY in Redmond, WA--Microsoft's home--are there more .NET jobs than Java. Everywhere else Java kills .NET.
You're comparing 1990s Apache to 2013 IIS. If you care to know what your talking about, you may wish to have another look to too what has changed in the last 10-20 years. Here's one example that's not only way out of date, but also wrong even for that time period :
> why is Apache still spawning processes for every request that comes in... don't they realize the overhead of that??).
Prior to the release'of Apache 2.0 in 2000 (fourteen years ago), Apache pre-spawned a group of processes and each process would handle one request AT A TIME. It never spawned a process for each request, it had a pool of processes that were reused. Pretty much just like how modern browsers now run separate tabs in separate processes. The #1 reason for that was to allow Apache to use libraries (like GD) that weren't thread safe. If Apache were multi-thread rather than multi-process, you couldn't use those libraries.
Note also that Apache was designed for SERVER operating systems like Unix, Linux, and BSD, not for a desktop OS. On a server OS, forking a few processes at startup isn't that resource intensive- far less intensive that preloading IE and Office at startup.
Of course like everything in Apache, the multiprocessing is done by a module, so you can still use processes rather than threads if you want to. You can do that and by choosing sane settings for the number of spare processes you won't fork new ones more than a few per hour.
> A lot of the performance reasons that are behind people switching from Apache to Nginx
I tested this very thoroughly. 90% of the performance difference of Nginx, which only occurs on some systems, is that it essentially forced noatime, regardless of the administrator's selection of mount options. Back when noatime wasn't the default, less-knowledgeable admins who didn't know to use noatime would see a significant performance benefit from Nginx vs Apache. Knowledgeable admins would mount with noatime, and find that Apache and Nginx performance was almost identical. Knowledgeable admins would also comment out the 90% of available modules they don't use, like mod_speling, and set MaxClients etc appropriately. With a reasonable configuration, Apache can give better performance than Nginx, depending on which benchmark you choose. In all cases, Apache provides more PREDICTABLE performance because it actually works as documented, while Nginx has documentation copy-pasted from elsewhere, but their code isn't actually the same as server they copy-pasted documentation from.
Your reply is also somewhat confusing to me. I don't think you've actually looked into the issue. .NET popularity has gone downhill as more developers want to use more dynamic and developer-oriented solutions which are almost invariably open source. This is an actual trend; a real statistic, and essentially the reason why MS went ahead and open sourced .NET.
If it is a real trend and a real statistic then please link to some reference for this. I'm interested to see. Maybe I'm not very good at Google searches but I cannot find any reliable statistics to support this.
As for C and .NET you can use .NET quite easily with C. Even if your project is strictly in C#, if you know C I doubt you'd have much trouble with C# (other than maybe getting the hang of good-practices?).
I code mostly in C++ and C# and have no trouble at all with C#. It's one of my favourite languages. My post however was not about myself, I was paraphrasing the original question, as perhaps I've missed something but the statement "why you are asking for citation when the whole discussion is sort of based on this issue" is completely at odds with how I read the original question - i.e. (very much paraphrasing here) 'Should I learn C# it seems to be the way forward'
Though even if your interpretation of the original question is correct, it would still not seem unreasonable to ask for a reference to support the statement that .NET is losing popularity. The only evidence of this "fact" I can see on this thread is mis-matched anecdotes, hence my reply to your post.