Why Startups Hate .NET and C#

Hello, everybody, I'm Nick, and in this video, I will go over some claims that .NET and C# are not popular among startups. There is certainly truth to that but I would like to investigate why.

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[ARumGremlin]

"For the love of God, there are F# developers and all five of them love F#". Haha.

[bscamba]

Two things I don't understand in tech:
1 - the love for Javascript
2 - the hate for C#/.NET

[darrencook]

My takeaway from this video: there needs to be a support group for the five F# devs.

[sarahkatherine]

Some of the reasons they hate .NET and C# that I have heard are:
- Anti-Microsoft bias (linux good, open-source good, windows bad, microsoft bad)
- Not cross-platform and/or closed source (apparently some people still live in 2012)
- "C/C++ C# is hard, Python is easy"
- "C# is the language of the past, now eveyone use Python"

In 2022 I attended a Job Fair at my previous university. One of the interviewer told me ".NET is for windows desktop app only, you can't create website with it.", and he still didn't believe me even after I showed him the web app I made for my father's clinic.

[reiku]

As an F# developer I feel attacked. We have a 6th developer now! Get with it old man!

[valera]

What I really love in C# is LINQ. This is absolutely brilliant in balance between magic and transparency. I think people in other languages don't like C# because they don't realize how awesome LINQ is.

[marianf]

I founded a startup and I love .Net .. In fact I went all in with .Net and Blazor. In the past 2 years it already proved to be the best choice. So much time saved and less headaches. I can't imagine building the whole thing with javascript. Yes, js is probably much easier to write on the short term, but on the long run it would've taken us over double the time and we would still have runtime bugs and a mess as the project grows. Even compared to .Net backend (or other language) and js frontend, we estimate we were still 25% faster with .Net and Blazor.

[Kwpolska]

“9 out of 10 startups will fail, the money is elsewhere is in the established companies” is the most important takeaway from this video (and one I fully agree with).

[ThaWolloW]

My degree actually focused on C# and .NET which was a big plus for me since I really like the eco system and language. And I find it easier to learn other languages with C# being my first programming language. :)

[Kevin_Long]

I'm now in my 50's, I've been working on .Net since it's inception and SQL Server since 6.5. I say this not to sound arrogant in any way but just to put things into perspective, I was a Microsoft fanboy and still am to a certain extent. My wife left her company 10 yrs ago to start a hardware business for ourselves. 8 yrs in she was making enough financially for me to leave my job and join her. We needed to start writing internal software to automate tedious manual processes because we were actually doing more business. I wrote every thing PHP. I'm not talking about the little PHP script kiddie code but proper maintainable software that can grow. I hired some really good PHP developers, we wrote our own framework and couldn't be happier, the dev, test, deploy lifecycle is just much faster for some reason. Oh yes, and we have Traits, just saying. 😂😂. Anyway, use what you are productive in, and that's it, the whole language debate is a waste of time. Keep on coding. 🤘🤘😎😎

[raphaelmt]

In my experience .NET and C# really shine when your codebase grows larger and you have a lot of reused code. Scripting languages are designed to make stuff work faster but when the codebase grows it becomes a mess faster too.

[evancombs]

I think the root of C# not being chosen by startups is a strong anti-microsoft bias. A lot of that bias comes from Silicon Valley being the hub for most startups. A secondary reason is due to .Net Framework's lack of cross platform support, and many people outside of C# circles not knowing the latest versions of .Net work on Linux.

[privatesocialhandle]

Yes, please make a video about the bad things about OOP and how to avoid them.

Also here are my opinion on the topic: (which are mentioned in the vid)

1. Legacy education: most if not all universities and colleges choose C and C++ as their low-level language of choice and Java as their high-level of choice. C and C++ are obvious. Java in the other hand you ask, why not C#? There is a lot to say here from the ecosystem of each at the time, who owns the techs, etc.

2. Open-source: open-source 100% changed people's perspective about .NET, even when not enough to make a decision to switch over, people don't look at it the same way (whether dislike, hate, disagreement, etc.) This open-source mentality of Microsoft not only empowered .NET from a C# or developer perspective, but also from IT perspective in PowerShell. But change takes a LONG time.

3. Website vs web application: I think this js extremely important, there are significantly way ore websites than web applications, even in our modern day when the term "web applications" covers a variety of web resources. And what do you use for websites? JavaScript. Even in the front-end side of things, web applications are built on JS at the core, which brings ALL the JS related tech that C# wasn't part of until Razor which is very very recent considering the time tech needs to age before it makes a market shift.

I may not be on point in some if my argument, but oh well, feel feee enlighten me!

[scrm]

My perception is that the majority of places using C# also use the whole Microsoft ecosystem, which means Windows. Sure, you can work on other platforms, but momentum matters.

[gnanaitvara]

I disagree with the notion that c# is not a starter language. To me it really is almost the ideal starter language. It hides the "headache" of pointers and memory management while still teaching that variables require system resources, computation can require threading etc. A mental benchmark which may be helpful is to take any language and imagine how difficult it would be to go from language X to C/C++, if it seems an insurmountable task then language X (or rather its tool chain) is probably hiding vast swathes of things from the programmer.

[KadenCartwright]

A large part of why startups dislike c# is that startups tend to have a certain scrappy kind of engineering culture and approach to development that the average C# developer would be pretty significantly at odds with.

In short, most c# devs would not fit into the culture of most startups imo

[RickTheClipper]

They hate C# until they understand that they miss the broadest base of developers.
All those other tools exist in 1, 000 different variants, change is the normal and if the freak that started the project leaves the company they will have a hard time to find a replacement

[ВладиславДараган-шф]

Because C# holds image of enterprise language like Java. That's all

[the-niker]

It's the same argument as the company with recent submarine implosion. Startups tend to hire young dynamic diverse teams without much experience, because it's so much cheaper than experienced workforce. Until the project implodes under all the incompetence.

[eherlitz]

In northern Europe, this is driven by the universities where Microsoft technologies are often viewed with repulsion and are often considered as an evil cyber imperialistic death star organization.
These younglings often promote application construction with tools like Node, "which is so simple to put everything together", not understanding that change management and the ability to maintain applications is one of the most critical aspects of system engineering.
And in the end, poorly written systems will cost more than properly coded ones ever will. I've only been in the business for 25 years, but as far as I can tell, Java and MS applications are the ones who survive. I am not saying all other languages are bad, but the project culture among the developers utilizing them is often questionable from a maintainability perspective.