Slashdot Mirror
Is Microsoft's .NET Ecosystem On the Decline?
Nerval's Lobster writes: In a posting that recently attracted some buzz online, .NET developer Justin Angel (a former program manager for Silverlight) argued that the .NET ecosystem is headed for collapse—and that could take interest in C# along with it. "Sure, you'll always be able to find a job working in C# (like you would with COBOL), but you'll miss out on customer reach and risk falling behind the technology curve," he wrote. But is C# really on the decline? According to Dice's data, the popularity of C# has risen over the past several years; it ranks No. 26 on Dice's ranking of most-searched terms. But Angel claims he pulled data from Indeed.com that shows job trends for C# on the decline. Data from the TIOBE developer interest index mirrors that trend, he said, with "C# developer interest down approximately 60% down back to 2006-2008 levels." Is the .NET ecosystem really headed for long-term implosion, thanks in large part to developers devoting their energies to other platforms such as iOS and Android?
Submitted by Nerval's Lobster? Check
Shilling for Dice? Check
hogwash
Fucking Slashdot is on the decline.
WTF do you think we want ot share Shashdot to Facebook and other shit for?
Fuck you guys suck at maintaining a fucking website. Stop changing everything. Stop trying to be all fucking social media. Just fucking stop.
Fuck you dice, and fuck you Nerval's Lobster -- your apparent function is to write fucking shill articles which point to fucking dice.
Remind me again why phones and tablets needed a different programming language?
This is why the one hope for C# is MS's partnership with Xamarin (but I think it's a good one). C# as a cross-platform alternative to Java would be all sorts of wonderful - but I won't believe it until it actually plays out that way. If a year from now there were no gotchas, I can really write an app* in C#, test it on my desktop, then sideload it into an Android and an iThing and get appropriate interfaces, and no surprises have happened with licensing? Well, that's a bright future for C# IMO.
It also doesn't hurt C# that Unity have become the "gateway drug" for game devs, giving another cross-platform venue for C# for those who choose it (it has hurt the Steam store, but that's another story).
*cue the "app" troll
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
With the .NET platform now being available for cross platform development I can't see how there could be a decline in C#. It's only been about 6 months since MS offered .NET for other platforms I don't think that's enough time for any valid conclusions to be made. Wait another 6 months to a year and then take another look. I think we will see an increase in C#/.NET reflected in those numbers.
...that no one cares about posted by some jackhole dice moderator. I wish some rich Slashdot reader would buy dice to acquire Slashdot, and then fire all Dice employees, and shut dice down. FU DICE! Stop ruining Slashdot!
EOM
.net was microsofts misguided attempt to staunch bleeding from open source competitors and recover from the increasingly drunken shit show that was ActiveX. The idea being that while most of the technology existed under Apache 2.0 license, the core redistributed package was proprietary. In typical day-late-dollar-short microsoft fashion the whole thing was hinged on a JIT compiler (because Java in 2002 was a godsend of speed and stability) and came with C++ support in 2005 (more than 20 years after the language was written...nice) via visual studio. Redmond still had a problem though, and that was without a proprietary language, the framework was pointless because C and company were all well known and reasonably portable languages that didnt net any extra cash to Microsoft. So borne of a committee C# came to be, and for many moons C# was wedged into most code shops the same way any other microsoft technology gets there: License bundles. You see programmers were writing plenty of windows software on windows machines, and compiling in windows, but discounts to licenses for the desktop OS the greybeards use was hinged upon accepting free licenses for .NET and the new C# visual studio compiler. Management, ever needful to maximize value, prevented their bosses from yelling at them and in turn started most projects down the intractable cobblestone back alley we know today as .net.
What made matters worse for everyone was now microsoft had an underhanded way to slash the tires of its competitors. If your software beat the pants off Microsoft they might buy it, but if you didnt sell and they knew you wrote C# they used the proprietary compiler against you and simply reimplemented your software with undocumented methods and subroutines that ran faster than yours. Theyd sit out your litigation until you folded, buy up your shop for cheap, and with a few modifications rebrand your application as a microsoft component.
Good people go to bed earlier.
This social media S--T they keep pushing.
These DICE links and plugs that we keep getting from Nerval's Lobster?
C# isn't declining in popularity from where I sit - Slashdot is.
Why do I come here?
Stick with program managing, Justin. Actually, given you were responsible for Silverlight, find some other career entirely.
If you check Perl, Java, PHP or C++ on Indeed.com, you will see exactly the same trends.
If you perform his same terrible analysis of the TIOBE index, PHP, C++, VB.NET, Objective-C are all going to collapse. Apparently Java has been "heading for collapse" since 2004.
People who can't do statistics shouldn't report on them.
The problem does not appear to be that C# is becoming less popular (than other languages), it's appears that custom application development as a whole is becoming less popular than it was a few years ago.
This may be due to the economy, outsourcing, mobile platforms or whatever. You can't suddenly pull reasons out of your ass like this being due to "Microsoft’s ever revolving door of new technologies", despite how pissed off you are at them for shit-canning your pet project.
When doing stats on whether something is less popular, it's helpful to ask "less popular than what". Sure, it may be less popular than it used to be, but so are the competing languages. This does not indicate that the C# ecosystem is going to collapse.
Fellow slashdot webdevs, please don't test in production. Below is how it looks like on Safari for Mac.
http://s7.postimg.org/5rhru2q6z/image.png
http://s7.postimg.org/qacnz544b/image.png
Not to spoil but the main problems are:
1. People that remained on classic Slashdot theme expects just that: the classic theme. Please don't change it. Considering that the main elements of the articles didn't change much (title, summary, number of comments, submitter, link, etc), the same going for the comments (title, score, commenter, date, etc) it shouldn't be hard to make a separate theme for this (admittedly stubborn) users and leave it alone.
2. The new "cartoon balloon" showing the number of comments is overlapping when the article is collapsed (see first screenshot above)
3. Seems like the old way to show the number of comments was forgotten below the cartoon balloon (see first screenshot above)
4. In the sidebar, seems like "This day on Slashdot" was completely forgotten in the new style (see second screenshot above)
5. It's really acceptable after being bought by Dice to show "Latest Tech Jobs" prominently in the sidebar, we understand that's one of the perks of being the owner. But at least put back the Poll above the fold and push Slashdot Deals and Featured Videos below the fold. 6. It may not have been the intention but it feels really underhanded to replace the (probable) most clicked link in the homepage (Read More) and replace it with the "Share" button. That will more likely to be the main complain, will cost Slashdot a lot of old timers and probably will be as loudly rejected as Beta.
Please put Read More back where it was, I'm sure you guys already realised we are not much a sharing bunch, privacy concerns and all that.
FUCK IT! I'll do it live and test it in production!
I want my fucking comment link back. Share? Who wants to share Dice shill stories.
It's the same analysis that lead people to conclude that because mobile gaming was on the rise, console gaming was therefore going to disappear. And the same logic let pundits to conclude that we're now in a "post-PC" world. The ascendance of one market does cause a shift in proportions of other parts of the market, but doesn't necessarily lead to a complete collapse. Even if .NET is in overall decline, I think that speaks to the larger decline, proportionally speaking, of the desktop PC market. However, Windows still *completely* dominates that market, so .NET/C# will likely remain strong there.
So, I'd say if we're talking about a "decline", that makes sense to me. If we're talking about a "collapse", that's absurd. Even if no one except Windows developers were using it, it would still not go away completely, because that's why the .NET platform and C# language were invented in the first place... to simplify Windows development.
Irony: Agile development has too much intertia to be abandoned now.