I'm impressed. That's the most thorough and well-researched comment I've seen on Hackernews, ever. Thank you for taking the time and effort in writing it up.
It compares NuGet with Maven calling the former cumbersome. It's a tell of gaps in research made but also a showcase of overarching problem where C# is held back by people bundling it together with Java and the issues of its ecosystem (because NuGet is excellent and on par with Cargo crates).
NuGet was only released in 2010, so I wasn't really referring to it. I was referring to Maven (the build tool part, not the Maven/Ivy dependency management part, which was quite a breeze) the build system and MSBuild. Both of which required wrangling with verbose XML and understanding a lot of syntax (or letting the IDE spew out everything for you and then get totally lost when you need to fix something or go beyond what the IDE UI allows you to do). If anything, MSBuild was somewhat worse that Maven, since the documentation was quite bad, at least back then.
That being said, I'm not sure if you've used NuGet in its early days of existence, but I did, and it was not a fun experience. I remember that I the NuGet project used to get corrupted quite often and I had to reinstall everything (and back then, there was no lockfile if my memory serves me right, so you'd be getting different versions).
In terms of performance, ASP.NET (not ASP.NET Core) was as bad as contemporary Java EE frameworks, if not worse. You could make a high performance web server by targeting OWIN directly (like you could target the Servlet API with Java), but that came later.
I think you are the one who are bundling things together here: You are confusing the current C#/.Net Core ecosystem with the way it was back in the .Net 4.0/Visual Studio 2008-era. Windows-centric, very hard to automate through CLI, XML-obsessed and rather brittle tooling.
C# did have a lot of good points over Java back then (and certainly now): Less verbose language, better generics (no type erasure), lambda expressions, extensions methods, LINQ etc. Visual Studio was also a better IDE than Eclipse. I personally chose C# over Java at the time (when I could target Windows), but I'm not trying to hide the limits it had back then.
Fair enough. You are right and apologize for rather hasty comment. .NET in 2010 was a completely different beast and an unlikely choice in the context. It would be good for the industry if the perception of that past was not extrapolated onto the current state of affairs.
