Are People Wrong About .NET?

Why do startups rarely choose dot net? Is c sharp just a boomer language? Let's dive into some dot net myths and try to figure out why startups seem to steer clear of it. In all my time working for and with startups, there seem to be a lot of misconceptions and legacy thinking around c sharp and dot net.

The first misconception is that dot net is for Windows only. Now those of us who have been in dot net for a while know that dot net's everywhere. Linux, Mac, Windows, Microsoft even supports a lot of different Docker images for even ARM platform. And you know, think that older dot net versions left a bad taste in the mouth of a lot of developers.

To be fair, it was rough the first few iterations, certainly for the web. One thing I've noticed is that startups seem to think that using dot net will tie you into the Microsoft ecosystem. For a database, we have to use SQL or maybe Cosmos in Azure. Maybe we have to host it only in Azure. Maybe we have to use Azure DevOps or we have to use Visual Studio to build.

None of those things are true now. Many people are building dot net apps with Postgres, using Redis, deploying on AWS, using GitHub actions, or building an Octopus deploy. There's a ton of options out there for all those things. Now there are people who think that Microsoft isn't very open source friendly.

And while that was the case ten, fifteen years ago, boy, they taken leaps and bounds since then. Now you've got Versus Code as open source, .net itself as open source, and a just a whole ecosystem, not to mention their contributions to Python, to JavaScript, heck, TypeScript. Now some people are gonna say, well, .net is just too slow. And, maybe it used to be, but that's not the case anymore, especially if you look at the tech and power benchmarks. Now if you're gonna go like speed, speed, speed, you're gonna be looking at something like a Rust or a Go or maybe even some kind of C.

But listen, let's be honest. Your startup doesn't have any users. That's probably not the first place you need to be optimizing. Of course, then there's the startup culture. I mean, certainly startups tend to skew younger with developers who are more fluent with languages like JavaScript or frameworks like React.

Of course, you also have the issue where dev machines, a lot of times are Macs and people think that you can't write .net on a Mac. And certainly I would agree that writing it in Visual Studio on Windows is probably more powerful, faster, a better debugging experience than Versus Code. You can certainly still do it and do it well. Of course, you'd also probably have to compete with enterprises that are gonna be using .net and Java developers more frequently. So you're gonna have to compete at their pay scales.

The truth is c sharp and dot net have come a long way and they are completely valid options for startups and enterprises alike. And really there's never been a better time to jump into that dot net ecosystem. What are your thoughts? Let me know in the comments and I'll catch you next time.