What′s new in C# 12: overview
douglasg14b @ douglasg14b @programming.dev Posts 2Comments 46Joined 2 yr. ago
douglasg14b @ douglasg14b @programming.dev
Posts
2
Comments
46
Joined
2 yr. ago
The great thing about languages like C# is that you really don't need to "catch up". It's incredibly stable and what you know about C#8 (Really could get away with C# 6 or earlier) is more than enough to get you through the grand majority of personal and enterprise programming needs for the next 5-10 years.
New language versions are adding features, improving existing ones, and improving on the ergonomics. Not necessarily breaking or changing anything before it.
That's one of the major selling points really, stability and longevity. Without sacrificing performance, features, or innovation.
Yessss.
C#/.Net backends are the best. The long term stability, DevX, and the "it just works" nature of all the tooling makes it a great choice. It's also fast, which makes scaling for most applications a non-issue.
I've switched to postgres for DB from SQL server, have never looked back, would recommend.
.Net + EF Core + Vue/TS + Postgres. Redis as needed, Kafka as needed.
I can get applications built extremely quickly, and their maintenance costs are incredibly low. The backends are stable, and can hang around for 5, 10+ years without issue or problems with ecosystem churn.
You can build a library of patterns and reusable code that you can bring to new projects to get them off the ground even faster.
Would recommend.
Yeah but the ecosystem drags it about as far down as you can go.
Backend development for large applications relies on stability, the JS ecosystem has anything except stability.This is okay for FE development where you naturally have a lot of churn.
It's a reasonable expectation that a backend built today should be maintenance free and stable over the next 5-10 years if no more features or bugfixes are required. And is buildable, as is, anywhere in that timeframe with minimal or zero additional work.
Additionally, strong backends in the same ecosystem are similar, they use similar technologies, similar configs, similar patterns, and similar conventions. This is not the case for JS/TS backends, there is incredible churn that hurts their long term stability and the low-maintenance requirements of strong enterprise, and even more importantly small businesses backends.
Mature ecosystems provide this by default this is why C#/Java is so popular for these long-standing, massive, enterprise systems. Because they are stable, they have well established conventions, and are consistent across codebases and enterprises.
This is a perspective most devs in the ecosystem lack, given that half of all developers have < 5 years of experience and the vast majority of that is weighted into the JS ecosystem. It takes working with systems written in python, TS, JS, C#, Java....etc to gain the critical insight necessary to evaluate what is actually important in backend development.
Edit: to be clear this isn't just shitting on JavaScript because that's what people do, I work with it everyday, TS is by far my favorite language. 2/3 of my career is with JS/TS. This is recognizing actual problems that are not singularly solvable with the ecosystem that pulls down its liability for backend development. There are languages and ecosystems are much better for your back end it's not that scary to learn a new language (many of my co-workers would disagree it's not scary 😒)
If you do this enough you know how to design your solutions to be relatively flexible. At least for your backends.
Your frontend will always churn, that's the nature of the job.
I do feel like C# saw C++ and said "let's do that" in a way.
One of the biggest selling points about the language is the long-term and cross repo/product/company..etc consistency. Largely the language will be very recognizable regardless of where it's written and by who it's written due to well established conventions.
More and more ways to do the same thing but in slightly different ways is nice for the sake of choices but it's also making the language less consistent and portable.
While at the same time important language features like discriminated unions are still missing. Things that other languages have started to build features for by default. C# is incredibly "clunky" in comparison to say Typescript solely from a type system perspective. The .Net ecosystem of course more than makes up for any of this difference, but it's definitely not as enjoyable to work with the language itself.