Aside from the EEE quip, I didn't catch any "M$ bad" vide in GP's post.
I think the situation is clear-cut: until recently, you couldn't really run .net on anything else than Windows, so the only people using it were those already invested in the ecosystem.
Among the people invested in the windows ecosystem, many (most ?) are large "non-tech" companies who hire people who mostly see their jobs as a meal ticket. These people don't have the inclination (for lack of curiosity, or time, or whatever reason, doesn't matter) to look into "interesting" things. They mostly handle whatever tickets they have and call it a day. Fiddling with some language that has a different paradigm wouldn't be seen as a good use of their time on the clock by corporate, or during their time off work by themselves, since they'd rather spend that time some other way.
That's for coming in my defense. You are right. I'm not a big fan of Microsoft, but I also don't hate them.
It's pretty simple, really. I am a Linux engineer, and it is not a great investment of time and money for me to get into .NET. I knew F# was cool, but is it cool enough to want to feel a second class citizen, running it on the OS and platform it is not intended to run on? It makes no business sense at all.
> is it cool enough to want to feel a second class citizen, running it on the OS and platform it is not intended to run on?
I'm not a software engineer myself, nor a Windows person, so I don't know the specifics, but FWIW, my client runs production .Net code of the C# variety on Linux, connected to pgsql. It's some kind of web service for checking people's tickets (think airport gates where you scan your ticket to enter), so not exactly a toy, even though it's nowhere near unicorn-scale. It seems to work fine, in the sense that I've never heard anyone complain about anything related to this setup. No "works for me but is borken in prod" or "thingy is wonky on Linux but OK on Windows so have to build expensive workaround".
The devs run VisualStudio (non Code) on their Windows laptops. Code is then built and packaged by Azure Pipelines in a container and sent to AWS to be run on ECS.
But it never was a tier 1 platform during its growth. So most non-Windows devs put their focus on other platforms. There is nothing wrong with that.
I could learn .NET now, but I don't really have an interest to do so at this point; Also, the devs you talk about are on Windows, using their tier 1 IDE (Visual Studio) that only runs on Windows, which is my point exactly.
That's a fair point. Tooling is an important aspect of a language, at least for me. I don't know what the VS Code on Linux experience is like for .net.
I tried to dip my toes into F# out of curiosity, and it worked by following some tutorial and VS Code. But it did seem somewhat bare bones. Although I'll admit I'm spoiled by Rust and IntelliJ.
I think the situation is clear-cut: until recently, you couldn't really run .net on anything else than Windows, so the only people using it were those already invested in the ecosystem.
Among the people invested in the windows ecosystem, many (most ?) are large "non-tech" companies who hire people who mostly see their jobs as a meal ticket. These people don't have the inclination (for lack of curiosity, or time, or whatever reason, doesn't matter) to look into "interesting" things. They mostly handle whatever tickets they have and call it a day. Fiddling with some language that has a different paradigm wouldn't be seen as a good use of their time on the clock by corporate, or during their time off work by themselves, since they'd rather spend that time some other way.
Hence, F# never really got any traction.