We still very much focused on .NET. We’ve had our head down working on a bunch
of things over the past 3 years; my two favorite things coming up that I
believe will completely change .NET:
.NET Native
ASP.NET vNext (in particular “CoreCLR”)
There is something very common with both these; a thin componentized
framework/runtime that ships with your app. Being componentized, we can release
and version individual libraries without requiring us to update one giant
framework. Similar to what we did with Roslyn (the rewritten C#/VB compilers),
these changes set us up long term to make larger investments without the
compatibility concern that comes with shipping a update to 1.8 billion machines.
From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] On
Behalf Of Greg Harris
Sent: Thursday, September 18, 2014 6:43 PM
To: ozDotNet
Subject: Re: [OT] Quiet
Hi All,
Warning long Friday rant to follow…
In summary the rumours of the demise of C#/.Net are very premature, but keep an
eye on the patient, health may be slowly declining.
<RANT>
When I was first at Uni (79-81) the business programming subject taught us
COBOL along with a few home truths about COBOL such as:
1) COBOL is the single most popular language by a large margin.
2) There are now better languages available, so COBOL will soon start
reducing its market share.
3) This will take some time because of the huge investment in existing
COBOL programs.
4) Do not expect many new projects to start that use COBOL in the next few
years.
In 20/20 vision hindsight, it is interesting to review this:
Point 1: Correct.
Point 2: The languages that were going to replace COBOL were Pascal/Modular,
ADA, or maybe C (but just for highly technical low level code). Today, the
only one of those languages to have any remaining traction is C.
Analysis: The other languages ready to replace COBOL were not yet ready.
Point 3: Correct, but it took a lot longer than expected.
Point 4: Where (in my experience) it was probably about 1993, a full ten years
later where COBOL stopped being used in new projects. This was because there
were a lot of shops that had a large COBOL library and COBOL team, so the new
projects took leverage off that base.
Analysis: The installed base created a huge inertia and slowed the process down
by at least 10 years.
Today, if you look at what languages are most popular, there is no one language
to lead them all like there was back in the 1970’s / 80’s, depending on the
site you look at, the top few will include Java, PHP, C/C++/Objective-C, C#,
VB/Basic/VB.Net, Python, Javascript, Ruby. The difference today is there is no
clear single leader.
Looking at
https://sites.google.com/site/pydatalog/pypl/PyPL-PopularitY-of-Programming-Language
1) Python is the language most in ascendancy.
2) Perl, Basic and C++ look to all be in clear decline.
3) Java is the head of the pack, staying consistently at the top, but not
by a large margin.
4) It is hard to read the graph, but it looks like C# continues on
reasonable growth.
5) But C# has just lost position 3 to Python.
So what is my analysis of the future of C#/.Net?
1) The large volume of C#/.Net developers and code library will provide a
large inertia, but nowhere near as large as what COBOL had.
2) C# is one of many C/Java derivative languages, the cost of porting your
program/skills from C# to another language is a lot less than the cost of
porting programs/skills from COBOL.
3) COBOL was owned by the community, C#/.Net is owned by Microsoft, so
C#/.Net is at the mercy of Microsoft’s wisdom (or lack of it).
4) Microsoft has shown a colossal lack of management skill when you look
at the complete train wreck that was the mismanagement of Silverlight!
5) Microsoft is a large legacy company, even with poor management, it will
not go away any day soon (look at the reducing dominance of IBM for a similar
example of durability).
6) It is too early to say if Satya Nadella (new MS CEO) is going to make
changes that will support the future of C#/.Net, but we can be sure that his
primary focus will be the wellbeing of the company not the wellbeing of C#/.Net
programmers!
7) Microsoft is closing its Research lab in Silicon Valley
(http://www.zdnet.com/microsoft-to-close-microsoft-research-lab-in-silicon-valley-7000033838/)
they are clearly making bold management decisions, some of these bold
decisions will affect the future of C#/.Net but it is too early to see how.
Conclusion, if Microsoft do nothing to help C#/.Net it has only another 5 years
life, but Microsoft are not going to do that as they too have a huge investment
in C#/.Net which should give it at least another 5 years life. Anyone trying
to look forward more than 5 years in this industry is being optimistic at best!
So I would say that C#/.Net has a good prognosis for the foreseeable future,
but keep an eye out for the unexpected, which could be positive or negative.
</RANT>
Regards
Greg Harris
On Fri, Sep 19, 2014 at 10:30 AM, David Connors
<[email protected]<mailto:[email protected]>> wrote:
On Fri, Sep 19, 2014 at 10:01 AM, Bec Carter
<[email protected]<mailto:[email protected]>> wrote:
Just the other day a friend of mine mentioned how at a meeting with the big
guns at her office they were referring to C# as "legacy". Am I now the new VB6
equivalent? Noooooooooooooooooooo. Help.
Probably a fair call. .NET has just been tinkered with for the better part of a
decade.
It is impossible to make sense out of Microsoft's client platform strategy any
more ... and with the move to cloud they probably don't care anyway.
David.
