From my perspective it's the younger (and/or less mature) tech community that do this, and even then that's just sychophancy posts on reddit or elsewhere about how amazing C# is and you're a dumb-dumb for using anything that isn't C# etc.
Those of us with longer teeth treat MS just the same as any org: We don't trust a single one of them.
They're right about C#, it's an amazing language because it's solid + steals the good parts from other languages. The best choice I ever made was switching from Java/PHP to C# back in the early 2000s.
I absolutely hate Microsoft for what they've done to Windows and Office - both of these were fantastic products for desktop users 20 years ago but nowadays they're either a bloated mess (Office) or spyware.
We really need to see PC gaming move completely away from it.
They still are good products. If you stick your fingers in you ears and forget about the bad bits. It's like living in a garden shed which has been painted nicely inside. You can live a happy existence with a bit of ignorance.
Whether they are right or wrong is largely immaterial (fwiw, I enjoy C# and it has been my bread-and-butter language since ~2005) but I'm not tribal about it like some get. Posts about actual oddities (DateTime), bad design (LINQ + IEnumerable<T> = default interface implementations), or attempts to implement something common from another tool (e.g., list comprehensions) will get you derision and contempt for daring to question the holy C# on /r/csharp and even StackOverflow.
By extension there is a similar toxicity around Visual Studio, and MSSQL somewhat, too. Frequent "Why would you want to use ReSharper!?" or "Rider???? You need to get an employer that can afford Visual Studio." etc.
The community on twitter - where most of alt.net moved - is fantastic. It's the main reason I still use twitter. Surprised that people use reddit for coding and stack overflow for discussion.
Unfortunately there is also the side you're talking about. There are a lot of people who are stuck in the mud, and also a lot of people who are just fed up with baseless religious hate from the Python/Javascript crowd and who have never bothered trying those languages (and thus know that it's just projection) and lash out.
The thing is - just look at the work MS do. For years JSON serialisation sucked so we all used NewtonSoft. Now the framework handles JSON properly. So there's hope yet for things such the Date API learning from Noda - and when it does it's miles ahead of any language where people are dumb enough to use an int32 linked to an arbitrary epoch (from one specific OS variant) to represent date/time.
Way off-topic, but I'm curious about how you approach unit testing.
Coming from Java into a C# job, I'm used to mocking downstream dependencies, and even POJOs in some cases, that a class depends on. C# has stuff like Moq, but you _have to_ wrap everything with an interface to mock it since C# seals by default.
Meanwhile, in JVM land, you can use Kotlin, which still seals classes by default, but allows test compiles to open classes by default so you can still mock them.
Every C# thread I read suggests wrapping all concrete implementations with an interface like I'm coding in the 90's for the sake of decent tests, or they talk about how my code must be written poorly for me to be in this situation. Meanwhile, I'm just trying to get _some_ testing into this code I've inherited.
Also, C# doesn't seal anything by default. The methods are non-virtual by default, but that's a very different thing, and there's a good reason for it when it comes to libraries and versioning.
You mean local time zone? Just use UTC everywhere, nothing else will ever work no matter how you design it. DateTimeOffset miiight work too, but you'll extract UTC from it to do anything meaningful anyway, so it may as well be UTC all the way down.
No can do, and frankly is a _very_ reductive stock response.
Anyone working with Date Times more than even months into the future will have pain. Politics will mess you up. You've made a reservation for 16:00 at that fancy pants restaurant with a 6 month waiting list. But now the government have decided that Daylight Savings are too much hassle, and suddenly your 16:00 reservation is off by an hour (or whatever the DS shift is for your region.)
Then there is industry specific scenarios - logistics for example. They know the plane is landing at 18:00, but we haven't confirmed the TZ yet. Not because the airport doesn't know what timezone it is, but because the carrier hasn't confirmed which airport they are landing at. They just know it's at 18:00. DateTime is utterly terrible with "unknown"
If you want to express an unknown moment of time, no time zone will help you. Also the reminder service specifically doesn't need to be precise to the second. If you forgot your plane and got a reminder about it 1 hour before departure, will you be happy that your reminder is so accurate?
I'm fluent in C#, TypeScript, Javascript, Java and Python. I'm pretty average in C/Go. Long ago I wrote a lot of Assembly, Pascal, Visual Basic and PHP.
Javascript/PHP are broken compared to C#. Python, Java and Go are verbose and clunky in comparison (although I appreciate being able to write self-contained native code in Go for so little fuss compared to C).
My hate is Python being used for anything outside scripting. Package management is archaic and broken, the quality of libraries is mediocre and the language stewardship has been poor. Particularly the way the 2.x > 3.x migration was handled. I'm still bitter about that. It remains one of the few ecosystems where picking up a project older than 6 months is playing a game of Russian Roulette as to whether you get it working within a week of messing around with broken code and dependencies.
Just in case that maybe interested to you. Currently (with nightlies) using NativeAOT + C# you would be able to have approximate same as Go. Even fully statically linking executable. And given that MS working on making apps have less size, gopefully it would be comparable to Go in app size.
I think you're right on the mark there. I'm jaded and cynical enough to know what's going to hurt me and what's going to pay the bills and that's where my interest stops. 20 years of C# and 35 years of Unix now :(
Worshipping any vendor is quite frankly a bit sad.
I tend to avoid having to solve problems now. If I do it tends to go somewhere vendor neutral like python on whatever platform happens to be lying around and not annoying me at the time.
When I was young I kinda liked them too. From the windows 3.11 / Win95 days until the end of Windows 2000 (let's forget Windows ME ever happened please). When office was already as capable as it is now and visual basic Kickstarted new rapid development.
Of course back then they were already full into megalomaniac mode with their attempt at having MSN (Microsoft Network) replace the open internet. No it was not just a news service then. However we all laughed them away.
These days I'm more cynical. And I hate telemetry and spyware which really wasn't a thing in those days for lack of always-on connectivity.
No, I think things are also worse but you have to understand there is a generation coming of age that never experienced paying for an operating system or really even paying any kind of substantial price for software of any kind. To them it would absolutely be worse to pay for software but not have it harvest your data. Most people aren't very cognizant of the data harvesting.
For a 1995 era vision, you can make a reasoned case for MSN. The competition was not necessarily the Open Internet, it was AOL/Prodigy/Compuserve.
The walled-garden platform did offer some benefits, particularly when you've got an audience new to the medium. This was an era before ubiquitous search, so the fact everything was in a single navigable heirarchy was more valuable. (Remember, this is also back when Yahoo was valuable as a directory.)
Since there was a single gatekeeper, you could promise a safer, more accountable and family-friendly environment for the social channels. Again, appealing to new users.
There may also have been potential for more exclusive content; if the walled-garden clients offered richer media (or the services better kickback) than what can be provided by a normal 1995 HTML tag-soup site running through an early IE or Netscape, it would be worth partnering with them.
I'm actually surprised that the walled gardens went down without a fight. They could have stayed around presenting themselves as a "premium over-the-top channel" style offering-- you can get the same basic internet as everyone else, but for just $5 more, all this extra. I can recall my parents were willing to pay $25/month for AOL when generic dialup was in the $10-15 range to remain part of specific communities inside the walled garden. AOL did an incredibly poor job pivoting as people moved to broadband-- I can recall there was a package to use their propriatery offerings with an external ISP, but it was expensive, until one day it was free because they realized they needed to keep their portal/email audience from imploding totally.
They've certainly managed to rehabilitate their public image. Not gonna lie I'm very impressed by Satya's leadership in that respect. I would probably prefer old Microsoft that was transparently evil though, license fees are more honest than data harvesting. Of course we know now that the license fee strategy simply isn't viable given what happened to IBM, so I doubt we ever see a change of course.
Those of us with longer teeth treat MS just the same as any org: We don't trust a single one of them.