I learned the hard way about the beauty of backups and the 3, 2, 1 rule. And snapshots are the GOAT.

Even large and (supposedly) sophisticated teams can make this mistake, so dont feel bad. It’s all part of learning and growth. You have learned the lesson in a very real and visceral way - it will stick with you forever.

Example - a very large customer running our product across multiple servers, talking back to a large central (and shared) DB server. DB server shat itself. They called us up to see if we had any logs that could be used to reconstruct our part of their database server, because it turned out they had no backups. Had to say no.

I am one… but I’m the only one I know at my company and socially.

The lists are quite similar with a slight reordering in the top 7 or 8. I guess both lists are a representative sample of developers… But there is one interesting difference:

IEEE: Python, Java, C++, C, JS, SQL, Go TIOBE: Python, C, C++, Java, C#, JS, VB (!), SQL

In IEEE, VB is way way down the list. Do IEEE members use VB less?

I’m always amazed that C still scores so high, but I’ve been told there is a lot of embedded work still going on.

Keep in mind that this is for « typical IEEE members », which I am pretty sure is not a great representative sample of programmers in general.

How many of you programmers out there are IEEE members?

To have library portability is a very cool feature. I hadn’t released that this was possible.

MAUI’s pretty undercooked at the moment. Editing UIs in raw XML, incomplete control set, bugs.

One day could be useful, and there are some 3rd parties providing controls… but of course this is microsoft so they will work on it for 2-3 years, and then write something new, throwing MAUI into the dustbin.

I’m guessing you are not programming on a Mac then :-).

I’m usually a little suspicious of a new fancy language - because the language is only a part of the equation. Does it have good tooling and does it have awesome libraries?

I had a preconception that Rust is strong as a language (formally well structured, low shoot-yourself-in-the-foot potential, consistent, predictable) and that the tooling seemed strong (debuggers, editors, code completion, help, test frameworks), but I’ve always thought that it would lag with libraries. I mean compared to something like Python (« Batteries included ») or java, surely it is not yet compatible, right?.

So I chose a few of the less main-stream libraries that I use regularly… and Lo and behold! They exist for Rust, including Couchbase, SQLite, ECDH, DiffMatch. I can’t vouch for the completeness of those libs, but the fact that everything I looked for existed… that’s impressive.

Cache clearing has been mentioned as a way to fix issues, but it didn’t work for me. I agree with your comment about the value in having a second IDE though.

No. I’m on a Mac, and VS is Mac/Windows only. (Well… windows only from next year).

After I saw your note, I had a quick catchup on that project.

It looks awesome, with the promise of mobile and desktop, and the ability to make apps that can be uploaded to the AppStore. Plus its Dart which is a pretty well structured language. Its ticking a lot of boxes…

Then I ran « wc -l » on my support libraries (i.e. not UI code) - 64k LoC that would need to be rewritten in dart. But then I noticed Flutnet. its probably an abomination linking the two… but it could be promising.

Thanks for the pointer.

Thanks. I’m very out of date with it.

I’ve had a few years experience in both C++ and C#. The learning curve is a lot steeper for C++ with many more opportunities to shoot yourself in the foot or create horrible hidden memory leaks. It sounds like the person making the recommendation is talking out of their arse.

If you have any experience in Java or any OO language, then the transition to C# is not so large. The language itself is not difficult - it will probably a couple of weeks to be comfortable. Its the frameworks and libraries that takes time, and there are a lot.

Here’s my view… it takes 10 or more years (IMHO) for a sharp person to become a senior developer. It takes a few weeks to learn a language. If I have to choose for a big project, I prefer to focus on choosing the right person, rather than just focusing on the language, because a good senior will just learn whatever they need at the start. They will also bring their years of experience in good design, methodologies, communication, mentoring, testing etc to the party.

I take back this comment partially. As 2023.1 (which I have), rider failed to support MAUI. As at 2023.2, they say they have preview support available. I’ve downloaded, and am giving it a try.

Rider doesn’t support MAUI. Nor does it support .net for iOS and .net for Mac which are part of MAUI and the natural upgrade from Xamarin. I downloaded Rider a few months ago and enjoyed being able to switch between VSMac and Rider, and especially enjoyed using CoPilot in Rider.

However Rider has a couple of nasty bugs that have been there for years - one of which was to ignore breakpoints. That came and went on me for a while.

I really like the idea of having a web UI for its portability and richness (esp thanks to CSS being so close to consistent across all platforms). But I have a metric tonne of business logic and ZKE code in C#/.Net running on Mac/iOS. From your prompt, I did just find Electron.Net, so perhaps there is hope.

And, AFAICT, electron can’t be used for iOS apps on the App Store (am I still wrong about that??)

Plus (personal bent) I did a ton of JavaScript years ago when truthiness and indeterminate behaviour was rampant back in ES5 days. I’m a purist and found it a little ugly, but incredibly fast. Then I found dart which compiled to JS, and I decided that JS made a better assembly language than a usable language. Sadly dart has remained a minor player. JS has moved on and I see lots of the old ugliness (like iterating through properties, exceptions and a sync) has gone away. ES13 looks pretty good, although I haven’t played with it yet.

Its hard to make a commercial decision for something that’s coming someday. But I hope it does arrive - I like Swift as a language (OMG - it was such a pleasure after the ugliness that is Objective C).

ROFL.

True on desktop OSs. I did quite a bit of commercial dev on GTK many years ago, but I always found the look and feel on Mac (esp) and windows quite klunky. I hear that quite a bit of work has been done on native theming, so perhaps my impressions are out of date. Having said that - GTK wasn’t bad to work with. I also did a project in WxWidgets, but again desktop only. It was not too bad for simple apps.

For the current app - first release target was iOS, then Mac, Android, Windows then Linux. So GTK was out since its not mobile friendly (I have heard you can do something on Android, but iOS is out).

Well… this is pretty crappy.

I built a Xamarin app (mac/iOS) because I wanted portability to windows. Then I was forced to upgrade to .net 6/7 because of a library I needed, and that meant upgrading to .Net for Mac/.Net for iOS (which is part of MAUI, but not using MAUI UI controls). MAUI is definitely undercooked at the moment.

What an awful and painful process, but I’m finally there… and they drop the main IDE for development. Damn.

VSCode doesn’t have a visual UI designer (well… neither does VSMac, but it does prepare a copy of your project and opens XCode for editing the storyboard/images, and copies changes back). So does this mean they will add that to VSCode? Or will we all have to switch to raw edits of XML to create UIs like you have to do with MAUI? Ick.

Developing GUIs for windows using MS tools is a lesson in frustration, especially when you want to have cross platform capabilities… WPF -> WinForms -> Xamarin -> Xamarin.Forms -> MAUI/.Net for {Mac,iOS}… Not to mention UWP… Each transition is a rewrite. Damn.