It boils down to a number of reasons: – The tooling never seemed to catch up with Java modules. In particular NetBeans, my IDE of choice since a few years back, was got stuck in the transition between Oracle and Apache. – Don't get me wrong: Java's tooling for anything else is still way ahead of anything else in my opinion. And yes, this includes Visual Studio, again in my opinion. – .NET Core now has better developer ergonomics on Linux then Java has. I still miss Maven, I still the miss built-in refactoring tools from NetBeans (or IntelliJ or Eclipse), but dotnet cli makes up for it in a number of other ways. – C# was always a better language than Java.

A number of other languages has been on my radar, here is why I prefer C# over them:

• Python:
  • IDE support.
  • Also as I grew older I don't think it is that beautiful anymore. Especially when I have to support other peoples python code.
  • Deploying it (without docker) can become messy for a number of reasons.
• Go: Have used it a bit, and even thought of making it my preferred language. It has a number of nice properties, particularly that it compiles to static binaries. Still:
  • There's very weak support for it in VS Code (I even think PHP is better supported, but I'm not sure)
  • Some of the ideas around the language just seems weird to me and based on the adoption of the language it seems I'm not alone.

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Filed under #coding #java and #dotnet