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
According to Dice's data,
Did they read tea leaves or chicken bones?
hogwash
My Slashdot layout just changed, there's no more 'read more' button. Just 'share'. You have to find the small annotation in the top right for the comments? What the hell.
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!
This seems more like an acknowledgement that ios and android are where the majority of new development jobs are right now than anything else.
Does that mean C# or .NET is on "the decline"? I suppose, strictly speaking yes. But it doesn't remotely mean its on the way to becoming like COBOL where its only used by legacy products. Windows destkop and servers are still being deployed in the millions, and .NET is an excellent platform for new development if you are targeting that market.
EOM
FUCK IT! I'll do it live and test it in production!
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
.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?
Remind me again why phones and tablets needed a different programming language?
For iOS, the current main programming language not a different programming language for the one heavily used for OS X desktop applications. (And the language Apple would like to see be a main programming language is also intended both for iOS and OS X.)
For Android, you have an OS with a different history; it uses a different language from the ones heavily used for applications on desktop operating systems, and, as they didn't try to make it into a desktop operating system (not many very open niches in that ecosystem), that didn't turn it into a popular language for desktop platforms. As for why they chose Java, well, maybe Andy Rubin liked it for some reason.
For Windows Phone/Windows RT/whatever, Microsoft didn't go for a different language from one of the languages for the desktop. Why they went .NET-only, I don't know.
So phones and tablets don't need different languages from laptops and desktops; the mix of languages is different for historical reasons.
Microsoft is pushing .net in directions no one thought it would five years ago in terms of being an open development platform. I think this will help boost c# popularity if anything. C# is a nice language to work with, and Visual Studio is a nice IDE to work with for the most part (it's virtual filesystem has got to go, and needs better RCS integration a la Eclipse).
I'm god, but it's a bit of a drag really...
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.
Perhaps, but that begs the "why not just go with Java?" question, since it supports both Android and every desktop OS (and lets face it NOTHING runs on both iOS and everything else, that's a pipe dream, unless you want to do QT stuff, which is great, but begs ANOTHER question, "why not just use QT/C++?").
"Malo periculosam, libertatem quam quietam servitutem." -- Jefferson
Microsoft sealed the fate of .Net by not choosing it as the basis for Windows 8.x and the metro UI. That indicated that Microsoft no longer sees .Net as the next gen framework for Windows, .Net has, of course, done its job. Which was to kill Java. Which, for desktop applications, it has.
As a Windows developer, it leaves me with somewhat of a dilemma. Which framework is the way forward on the Windows platform? It's not MFC, nor Silverlight. Is it .Net? Is it Metro?
return 0; }
Java dwarfs .NET, no matter what the MS shills claim. Whether or not Java is superior to C# is rather besides the point, rather how it was fairly irrelevant how superior any number of languages were to C in the 70s through the 90s (or by some definitions even now). It's simply a matter that Java was for a long time the only major cross platform application ecosystem, so the big enterprise outfits used it, and it's become rather like COBOL.
Microsoft flunkies love to get into these pissing matches with dominant technologies, and try to rejig the question so their products and technologies have the appearances of being on top (just look at how the shills try to act like Surface has any relevance at all).
If I was looking at getting back into coding (which I'm not, I've happily left that world behind), I'd sharpen up my Java skills, as I'm more likely to find sustainable employment there than with whatever Microsoft is trying to fool me into using now.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
Hard for silverlight to be "on the decline" - it was always crap. It was crap when it was first unveiled, it stayed crap, it's still crap. Nobody gives a crap about it, cause it's crap. When I see sites using silverlight, I know the site is gonna be crap, too, even more so than flash (which is also mostly crap).
C# in general, though, is amazingly pretty. So is the winforms API, and so is asp.net MVC (not webforms, webforms was super crap). I'm absolutely happy to have a job that's built on C# programming (didn't plan it that way, just sort of happened), and I've started using C# for little scripts and stuff I need at home, too. I don't think it's on the decline at all.
Perhaps, but that begs the "why not just go with Java?" question
Java is .. not very good. I've alternated between Java and C# professionally over the past 8 years or so, and while they used to be quite similar, C# is worlds ahead now (thanks, Oracle!).
lets face it NOTHING runs on both iOS and everything else, that's a pipe dream,
Check out Xamarin. "With a C# shared codebase, developers can use Xamarin tools to write native iOS, Android, and Windows apps with native user interfaces and share code across multiple platforms. Xamarin has over 1 million developers in more than 120 countries around the world as of May 2015."
There's a reason this is MS's last, best hope for C#. If the Xamarin stuff is bundled free with Visual Studio 2015's free version (as has been promised, but we'll see), it will be something special. If it were anyone but MS, I'd say right now this was going to be a huge win, but it's such a big change in attitude for MS - well, we'll see.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
Actually Java ON THE DESKTOP has no more security implications than any code written in any other language. Worst case it does something nasty, and Java does NOT sandbox your primary application thread or any of its spawn unless you specifically configure it to do so. So DESKTOP Java is a non-issue.
As for web-browser Java plugins, those are just like all other plugins. They've proven to be open to a number of exploits. If you wouldn't use Flash or Silverlight why would you expect to be able to use Java? I mean I wish Oracle would FIX these issues, but my guess is every piece of web-exposed code in existence is riddled with an endless supply of these security holes, not just plugins.
On the SERVER side there's again no issue, Java is no more or less a security problem than any other application running on your server, all of which you presumably have locked down, vetted heavily, and watch carefully.
There's really no special particular 'Java' security issue. Using .NET, Node.js etc etc etc won't particularly make you more secure on the server-side, and for the rest Java is the same as anything else too. Welcome to the world.
"Malo periculosam, libertatem quam quietam servitutem." -- Jefferson
just no reason to go with them when Java is already there and does the job quite well thank you
Wow. Just wow. "I know X, so there's no reason the world needs not-X". All Turing-equivalent languages can do the same job, but Java does that job with about 3x the boilerplate of C# (otherwise they're fairly similar, as Java has finally caught up with every other real language in adding list comprehensions). The lack of proper generics/templates in Java is still a daily pain in my ass, however, as is the simple inability to do List<int>
I understand a preference for the familiar, but when 2 languages are as similar as C# and Java, and one is just better implemented, it seems weird to form an emotional attachment to the other. (Unless this is all really MS-hatred, in which case fine, Win95 killed my pappy, whatever.)
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
It depends on your situation but, right now, C# is the only language that you can use to write programs for Windows Desktop (including Win32/.NET/Modern), Web, Mac Desktop, Android, and iOS.
And with all of the OWIN stuff you'll be able to run pristine .NET apps on OS X and Linux.
And you'll be able to host all of this code in one source-controlled Visual Studio project.
It may not be a reason to switch a shop entirely, but there is definitely a unique value-proposition.
Dissolve... Resolve... Evolve...
I think the problem is that you can make a higher quality product using Qt, but it IS more expensive. Writing C# code, or Java line-of-business stuff is just more cost-effective when the use cases are very specific. I mean I wouldn't write some one-off program to manage some tiddly business process somewhere in C++/Qt because nobody cares if it has to run on a Windows box, and nobody cares if it is fast, small, or even all that reliable. So a vast array of stuff exists in these environments.
Then there's super high-reliability stuff, like most of the code I write. It has to handle 400 million transactions in a week and never crash, never miss one, etc. It certainly COULD be written in C++, but the hunt for stupid programming errors you can't make in Java just makes it more costly. Its also easier to train a Java/C# guy to a level where he can do decent work.
"Malo periculosam, libertatem quam quietam servitutem." -- Jefferson