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C# has become a poor jack of all trades, trying to be Java, Go and F# at the same time and actually being a shity poor version of all of them. On top of that .NET has become a very enterprisey bloatware. In all honesty, I'm not surprised that they went with Go, as it has a clear identity, a clear use-case which it caters for extremely well and doesn't lose focus with trying to be too many other unrelated things at the same time.

Maybe it's time to stop eating everything that Microsoft sales folks/evangelists spoon feed you and wake up to the fact that only because people paid by Microsoft to roll the drum about Microsoft products telling you that .NET and C# is oh so good and the best in everything, maybe it's not actually that credible?

Look at the hard facts. Every single product which Microsoft has built that actually matters (e.g. all their Azure CNCF stuff, Dapr, now this) is using non Microsoft languages and technologies.

You won't see Blazor being used by Microsoft or the 73rd reinvention of ASP.NET Core MVC Minimal APIs Razor Pages Hocus Pocus WCF XAML Enterprise (TM) for anything mission critical.


If not for Microsoft's backing, C# would have died a long time ago. It's just another D, but with a lot more money behind it. It had its chance/momentum, but it failed, and its time has passed. Resurrecting the language now would be very difficult.


Meanwhile .NET developers are still waiting for Microsoft to use their own "inventions" like Blazor, .NET MAUI, Aspire, etc. for anything meaningful. Bless them.


"anything meaningful"? Does this mean that those technologies aren't used for anything meaningful, or that you're simply not aware of them?

(I'm simply not aware of them but that also means I won't make any statements about these)


Doesn't matter. Some could care less what MSFT is doing - a Blazor app I developed in super-speed time has collected 40k transactions in the last 4 months. It did it's job.


Aspire is made with Blazor


Bing is made with ASP .net


must be a paid troll, no self respecting intelligent engineer would find the Azure portal good. it’s horrible ux, really convoluted and complicated, very unintuitive, horizontal scroll is a joke when the web scrolls vertically, tiny fonts making everything hard to read and screens overloaded with so much shit and yet they managed to not put on the screen the main thing that developers would care about. it’s a complete joke


Major pain point in Azure -- Azure resources in the portal do NOT show:

* WHEN the resource was created * nor WHO created the resource

IMHO this is unforgiveable, but on second though, it is probably intentional rather than any sort of oversight.


it is hit and miss nowadays. definitely better than it was, though. somethign that should be common engineering criteria, i agree.


I am constantly forced to use Azure by idiotic companies which use .NET and the entire .NET mono culture which fetishises Azure and I can say with clear conscience that Azure is the shittiest dumbest most ill engineered clusterfuck of a cloud that has ever been unleashed on developers. It’s so bad that in the last 5 years even some of the most die-hard C# shops in the UK have changed their leadership and started to move away from Azure because they cannot afford to ignore the absolute insane state of it. Literally at every junction where Microsoft could have gone with a feature in Azure one way or another they somehow managed to not only pick the worse of the two, they somehow managed to bastardise it even more beyond anyone’s imagination.


hello dustin, back to your anti-.NET crusade even if there's literally nothing in .NET that requires you to touch Azure?

Would you tell us how the monoculture you speak of (which, for some reason, uses AWS, K8S, Postgres, Mongo, etc.) hurt you?


Things like Markdown work because they are intuitive, but the date range syntax in Markwhen is anything but intuitive.

Why 2025-01-22 / 2026-10-24?

Why not 2025/01/22 - 2026/10/24?


Because this is ISO 8601 date format, the standard date format that intentionally uses dashes to not confuse 25/01/22, 01/22/25 and 22/01/26 which are the same date in different formats

(that's why it uses dashes for dates, as for why it uses / for interval I have no idea)


It's using a slash because that's how ISO 8601 defines time intervals. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_8601#Time_intervals


Thanks for linking that. I’m a big proponent of using ISO 8601 but had either missed or completely forgotten about it specifying a format for intervals.

Note that ISO also permits a double hyphen as the interval separator which is hugely preferable to me personally and also works with file names (as mentioned in that Wikipedia article)


Doesn't look like IOS 8601 allows spaces though so this is still an ad-hoc syntax.

RFC3339 at least lets you replace the ugly T with a space but also doesn't specify any spaces around "/" for ranges.


I know ISO 8601, but that doesn't answer my question. Let me rephrase this, why was a format intuitive to a machine chosen instead of a format which feels more intuitive to a human?

I think YYYY/MM/DD - YYYY/MM/DD will mean the correct thing to many more people than YYYY-MM-DD / YYYY-MM-DD, which I suspect many will interpret as an OR and not a RANGE.


EDTF has advantages in less ambiguity. At the same time, Markwhen does also support non-EDTF dates too. The docs do a good job of explaining both https://docs.markwhen.com/syntax/dates-and-ranges.html

Personally I think it goes a little over-flexible on support for non-strict formatted dates to the point it becomes difficult to figure out what a given date string is going to result in rather than feeling easier to use. That's probably part of the reason the primary example uses the clearer format.


> intuitive to machines

Because the “humans” messed up so bad that there weren’t many options left for a simple enough standard.

I would prefer ISO 8601 too over some slight variation which is allegedly more intuitive for homo sapiens sapiens. To keep it simple.


Any time I see slashes in dates I do actually have to double-check whether it's DD/MM or MM/DD.


Hyphens.


Better: 2025-01-01..2025-01-31: (eg: git-log-ish format)


I'm with you on / not being a good range separator but using it for the individual dates is much much worse. Please stick to - for YYYY-MM-DD to avoid confusion and keep / restricted to inbred date formats.


I run https://msgdrop.io which is a commercial alternative with a great API and handy features.


It only seems reasonable until this thinking eventually gets you to the point where the next platform you choose to leave is called Earth. It's pretty dumb because there is nothing like X at the moment. Just for context, the Guardian had almost 11 million followers on X and Bluesky has only just crossed 15 million total users, of which many signed up months ago when it was opened to the public and never logged back in since again.


> eventually gets you to the point where the next platform you choose to leave is called Earth

On the other hand, that's the express goal of the owner of X.


And who exactly controls the Earth, such that I would want to leave the platform due to mismanagement?

Also, the "nothing else is like twitter" argument is both wrong (lots of social media platforms are bigger) and irrelevant (it assumes that having something like twitter is a net positive -- the validity of which assumption I am not convinced).


Exactly, says a lot about the fragility of the Guardian


Or the community notes are not actually the reason.


Can you explain that?


As an attendee I can say that online conferences make absolutely no sense at all and I don't know a single co-worker or dev who actually likes them.

Here are some of the reasons why online conferences are extremely shit:

- Live streams often don't work reliably

- If live streams work they have other issues, which make it pointless, like having the speaker in view but not the slides they share, so you don't see what they talk about, or they have zoom issues, or they have issues with the angle of the camera, or audio sync issues

- Many online conferences use weird never-heard of software, which never works for all participants, have unintuitive UIs and chat functionalities, etc.

- Zero community vibes

- Despite it being online they still impose maximum limits on how many people can view a single session, like WTF? Unlike with a real conference where you just have to show up 5 minutes early to a talk you find yourself unable to view the online talk you wanted to see unless you start queueing in the virtual queue an hour or longer in advance

- 0 networking opportunity, which is the main reason why people go to conferences

- Tickets are still expensive even though you only get 1% value of the in-person equivalent and that 1% is still shit

Overall online conferences are a complete waste of time and I will never attend one again. Most speakers don't give a complete new talk at big conferences either, so every single talk that people give were already given at smaller conferences, or tech meetups and you can find almost every talk on YouTube in a much better more convenient format so really the value of the online conference is near ZERO. Networking is the main reason and that is non existent online.

Just my 2 cents


Folks who run conferences like hytradboi and p99 were likely not going to run any in person conference at all. So it's not like they picked this over any other option other than not doing any conference at all.

Is it really better these organizers do nothing rather than create an online conference? I don't see how that's better personally.

If you don't like online conferences that's totally cool. I think Jamie addressed most of your points too. But hytradboi and p99 are actually excellent and this comment would feel quite demoralizing to me if I were running one of these online conferences.


>Is it really better these organizers do nothing rather than create an online conference? I don't see how that's better personally.

It may well be. I regularly attend one small conference that is very much about the personal interactions with the presentations mostly an add-on. There would have been no point in having people submit a bunch of YouTube videos.


I really can't relate to this attitude at all. :) Agree to disagree.


Fair enough but if I'm running a small non-commercial conference, and can't get people together in person, not sure of the value of giving people a tag to upload YouTube videos and having some sort of real-time schedule given that they can do so with or without my help. My experience is that viewership of such conference presentations is very low. And people can always upload their own videos.


We did Instant Premier on YouTube for TigerBeetle Systems Distributed videos and it was a cool experience to have everyone chatting about the video in real time for a few minutes. This is basically the same thing that p99 and hytradboi do.

It's also curated by the organizers. People subscribe to newsletters like Postgres Weekly for the same basic reason. Someone you trust gets interesting people you (probably) don't know and you get to chat about it with other randos.

It is not remotely the same thing as an in-person conference. But it's a neat thing in its own way. p99 is free, and hytradboi was like 10% the cost of a typical North American conference.


Don't kill the messenger. I'm sorry that that's how I feel, but as the consumer I'm just saying that I don't like the product (online conferences). Sorry that this is demoralising, but I'm not gonna start liking a shitty product all of a sudden to make someone feel better about it.

I'm sure there are other people who feel differently, I have not met them yet, which makes me believe that the group of folks who find an online conference okay is significantly smaller than those who hate them but don't let yourself getting stopped by my personal opinion, if it gives you joy to run an online conference then be my guest and best of luck!


The article does address all those issues, which, while I agree heartily with your comment, makes it feel a little bit redundant?


Why does it matter if it’s written in Rust?


Rust gives you the performance of C++ if not better sometimes, with code that won't go haywire at the 11th hour. There is value in that, particularly in an application that's sole purpose is to load arbitrary stuff from the internet.

Also if it was written in anything else, it probably wouldn't get the coverage it gets ;)


Rust was invented to make it easier to write a secure, performant browser engine


It's funny; I wish Rust was better suited for bare metal than it is now. But no matter how much people perceive Rust as a bare metal language like C, it was quite literally made for a level or two above that, in browser engines.

(Here's to hoping Rust for Linux continues to drive progress for bare metal Rust!)


Projects written in Rust tend to be very fast - as fast as C++ or C code - but without the endless security issues.

You may as well ask "why does it matter if this bridge is made of iron".


There are long lasting bridges made of stone, concrete and in the right climates, even wood. Not to mention rope when it suits the purpose.

Each material has its own qualities, which means its own pros and cons in a given context.

This naive belief that there will be one language to rule them all (and is name is <fill-in-the-blank> ignores history and the world outside of programming in a rather silly way.


> There are long lasting bridges made of stone, concrete and in the right climates, even wood. Not to mention rope when it suits the purpose.

I'd be fine with someone building a new browser out of stone, concrete, wood, or even rope.

Just don't build it out of C/C++ because those languages aren't memory safe.


Rust is a risk-reduction strategy. It is not a risk-elimination strategy.

There are risk-reduction strategies one can follow with C++, which offer some fraction of the reduction that Rust does (opinions vary on the value of the fraction). Rust enforces risk-reduction strategies, which in some contexts may be of value all by itself.

Language choice does not eliminate risks in software.


> opinions vary on the value of the fraction

They don't really. It's been shown by many studies that 2/3 of security bugs are memory safety errors. That's the minimum that Rust can eliminate.

It actually should eliminate more because it also has the strong type system and tree-ownership style that help reduce the chance of logic bugs unrelated to memory safety too (similar to Haskell and other very strongly typed languages).

This is probably the biggest data set:

https://security.googleblog.com/2024/09/eliminating-memory-s...

Unfortunately they don't break out non-memory safety vulnerabilities, but they've almost eliminated memory safety vulnerabilities by writing new code in Rust.


Nobody is saying that. But to continue your analogy, do you not think that in a world where all the bridges are made of wood it would be notable to say that a new bridge is made of steel?

Of course there are impressive projects made with C. But we generally don't build large bridges out of wood anymore do we.


> do you not think that in a world where all the bridges are made of wood it would be notable to say that a new bridge is made of steel?

Notable, sure. But it could turn out to be Tacoma Narrows bridge.

We never did build large bridges out of wood, I think. For the right context, wood is still a preferred material for some bridges.


> We never did build large bridges out of wood, I think.

Yes we did. They just haven't survived. For example London Bridge was "various wooden bridges, AD 50 – 1176".


I guess "large" has a bit of wiggle room built in.


Try your best to ignore the rewrite-it-in-Rust people. They're just plain wrong for that. But yes, for a niche like browser engines, Rust is pretty darn well suited.


1) I suspect that it's important for potential contributors to know what language it's written in.

2) It mattered enough for you to complain about it for some reason, so look at that reason, then look at its reflection.


Huh, Complain??


A few thing from the top of my head:

- Might be interesting to integretors (FFI, dylib, Rust projects)

- Signals some characters: that it's probably safer than alternatives written in non memory safe languages in same class, has good performance

- Might attract contributors (ie I'm sure there's an intersection of people passionate abou the web and Rust)

- This is hacker news, so it might earn a few extra +1s :P

Edit: formatting


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