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 <da...@connors.com> wrote: > On Fri, Sep 19, 2014 at 10:01 AM, Bec Carter <bec.usern...@gmail.com> > 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. >
