> And nothing gets even fucking close in terms of productivity to C#.
C# gets compared to java a lot for a good reason, and yet the languages and ecosystems have since diverged in their priorities and abilities. This gets even more complicated when considering F# and Scala. Do you think Java would offer similar productivity, or are there aspects to the C# that are—in your personal experience—uniquely productive?
I wrote c# professionally for 8 years and now have switched to a codebase mostly in Java and some kotlin. I know some of this is learning curve but none of those things mentioned are anywhere close in JVM. Build systems, package management, close IDE integration for test runners, builds, etc. The ability for the IDE to even know what version of Java you want the project to run in even though it's defined in the project doesn't exist. Kotlin as a language does some nice things but even the syntax highlighting is better with c#. Async is trivial in c#. The orm makes it so you can write db queries in c# with Linq and not have to mess with SQL. SQL injection isn't even a thing I ever had to think about but now I have to write actual SQL inline with my code to do any sort of non trivial queries. Were using maven which is apparently older than gradle so maybe that is better but having to remember do clean then compile before any type of build required action has caught me with so many things. Like migrations or tests including non existent files. There are more things that drive me crazy but this post will get unreadable and it's ranty enough as is.
I went from C# to JVM/gradle and have the opposite experience.
1) default C# IDE is junk compared to IntelliJ
2) Gradle give you insane level of control over project you can even build dynamic template tasks shown in IntelliJ UI using Kotlin/Groovy
3) JVM ecosystem is much bigger and default framework SpringBoot is ready to use with houndreds of integrations which are either non existent or hards to use in .NET as opposed to SpringBoot where you have batteries included approach e.g. want outbox pattern? Simply use modulith, convention over configuration will give you some nice defaults…
4) There are plenty of widely used langs compared to .NET if you don’t like modern Java (which is on the same level as C# IMHO) you have: Kotlin which is a better lang than C#, Scala, Groovy from the mainstream ones and Clojure and probably many more lesser known.
5) There is nothing as expressive as Groovy Spock for testing in .Net world.
There are issues I see but can be easy mitigated e.g.
I don’t like default Java heavy ORM (especially mapping complicated two way relations) but it’s very easy to not use them and simply relay on mapping foreign key.
To sum it up I bet your issues are mostly you don’t know ecosystem well enough.
Compared to old VS: First and foremost: feature richness of refactorings, code inspections and plugins - basically in the IntelliJ you have everything Reharper plugin can do for .NET and probably more. Second IntelliJ can run on non-spying operating systems. Third it's much more resource friendly for bigger projects. Last but not least ItelliJ is keyboard user friendly (e.g. you can jump and resize windows using only keyboard).
Can't say much about vscode vs IntelliJ. When I tried it last time Java plugin was not there. I could not use ItelliJ keyboard shortcuts - also code formatting and refactoring options were worse than in the itelliJ. That's to be expected it's paid product after all.
vscode is basically a bunch of different tools duct taped together and, as a result, constantly breaks. It's a lot closer to being emacs than it is to being an IDE (and I say this as a fervent emacs user outside of large projects). Even with the language servers, IDE functionality is going to be playing catch-up for the next decade. Intellij definitely has a leg up there.
I've never used visual studio before so I assume the comparison is going to turn up a different set of issues. However, being tied to windows is probably not a good thing in the long term.
This is definitely all just a learning curve on how to do this. None of this is accurate at all.
- IntelliJ knows exactly what version of Java you want to run and develop against.
- Async is also trivial. Just fire off a virtual thread.
- it sounds like your company just picked a bad orm. Any good one is going to escape sql injection when binding variables. You are using binding right? If you to “write it in Java” there is also jOOQ.
The one thing I do think C# is far superior at is packaging and distribution. It’s beyond simple to package a C# application into stand alone binary, whether is be AOT or JIT.
Java has that. It's just not the default choice because there is no default choice like in .NET. The options I know of: QueryDSL, jOOQ, Ebean with generated query beans.
C# gets compared to java a lot for a good reason, and yet the languages and ecosystems have since diverged in their priorities and abilities. This gets even more complicated when considering F# and Scala. Do you think Java would offer similar productivity, or are there aspects to the C# that are—in your personal experience—uniquely productive?