Programming is mostly research. Researching curses to cast on the guy who wrote the Incomprehensible mess you’re currently debugging.

I’ve programmed C# for nearly 15 years, and have used goto twice . Once to simplify an early break from a nested loop, essentially a nested continue. The second was to refactor a giant switch statement in a parser, essentially removing convoluted while loops, and just did a goto the start.

It’s one of those things that almost should never be used, but the times it’s been needed, it removed a lot of silliness.

async/await was introduced in version 4.5, released 2012. More than a few releases at this point!

Powershell

/s

The company I work for is smort

This is every company I’ve ever worked for. If other people didn’t vouche for their own tests, I’d assume automated testing was a myth.

Razor

Razor is the templating engine that’s been there since the original MVC. Blazor Server is the one that needs a server and streams changes to the client using signalR. Blazor WASM is the one that uses Web Assembly. As of .Net 8, Blazor can now also ne used as a generic SSR backend. They all use Razor Components, which is a component model using the Razor engine.

Not to be confused with Razor Pages, which is also a generic SSR backend.

To list some good ones that haven’t already been ssid:

Stop podcasting yourself

A problem squared

Secretly Incredibly Fascinating

Htmx for server requests and AplineJS for client interactions

You can write it in whatever language you want, as long as it’s rust.

/s

Depends:

For websites: Htmx + AlpineJs on the front end, ASP.NET Razor Pages and PostegreSQL on the backend.

For Web Apps; Blazor and PostgreSQL

I didn't have an answer for a very long time. Or more seriously, the answer was "the one that paid the most". I've run the gamut of popular languages, C, C++, Java, Javascript, perl, ruby, Python, Visual Basic, VB.Net, C# and F#.

But the last couple years it's really been C#. The pace of development on the language/runtime has really picked up with yearly releases. The features that are added and iterated on are expressive and intuitive. You can tell from the discussion posts on how a feature is being considered for inclusion is thoughtful and deliberate. It really feels like the language is in good hands.

Just wish those hands weren't Microsoft.

Wild swings between the greatest trip you’ve ever had, and excruciatingly slow death.

I find ORMs exist best in a mid-sized project, most valuable in a CQRS context.

For anything small, they massively over complicate the architecture. For the large enterprise systems, they always seem to choke on an already large and complex domain.

So a mid size project, maybe with less than a hundred or so data objects works best with an ORM. In that way, they’ve also been most productive mainly for the CUD of the CRUD approach. I’d rather write my domain logic with the speed and safety of an ORM during writes, but leverage the flexibility and expressiveness of SQL when I’m crafting efficient read queries.

Some of us have had to support multiple database targets. So I don’t know about changing a database in a running application, but a good abstraction has made it easier to extend support and add clients when we could quickly and easily add new database providerz

I like Blazor and use it exclusively at my work (usually to build the same type of stuff I’d use a HARP approach in a personal prj).

Blazor is awesome, but really is attractive to backend .Net developers more than anyone else. However, Blazor has a bunch of downsides: Blazor Server is too chatty to build scalable public facing webapps. Blazor WASM has a massive initial payload, which makes it slow and heavy.

Also, it just really falls into being overkill for so much stuff on the web. Half the shit I’m paid to build with Blazor would be faster and cheaper with just some htmx. Most SPAs are attempting to build a sand castle with an excavator.

I’d use what I’ve been experimenting with exclusively on personal projects: htmx, AlpineJs and Razor Pages on PostgreSQL AKA the HARP stack. Obviously, a hilarious acronym was needed.

Which might sound esoteric and hipster, but I’d contend it’s pretty close to how we were building websites for decades before the cult of the SPA took over. For those not in the know, HARP is built with no fe frameworks, everything is rendered server side and html is swapped in the DOM on the fly. Htmx is a very tiny js library that makes backend requests to the server, and renders the returned htmx within the current page. AlpineJs is a client-side js library that acts like a modernized and simplified jQuery. Razor Pages is part of the ASP.NET web framework that runs on .Net, and produces html from Razor templates coded with C#. My professional work is on SQL Server, but I like PostgreSQL as the runner up because I’m not paying mssql out of my own pocket.

I’m wouldn’t be concerned with hiring since I’d mostly just need C# developers with some designers. .Net developers are a dime a dozen, and many are seasoned vets with 15+ years experience building with .Net. It’s easy to build a career with just C#/.net/asp.net so few of these devs are running around flipping frameworks every few hype cycles.

But I might have just shown my age and bias.

Counter hot take, I do actually like Blazor but it has limitations due to how immature web assembly still is. It also does not solve the problem of being a big complex platform that isn’t needed for small simple apps. Of the half dozen projects I’ve written in Blazor, I’d personally re-write 3 or so in just Razor Pages with Htmx.

What do you mean going to? Internet Explorer supported VBscript, which was a “competitor” to Javascript. Though being locked to ie was a hindrance to adoption. That, and it was based on vb.

Plus, with server side rendering you also have to recompute the HTML for the entire site, which often means re-computing a whole bunch of non-trivial queries as well.

This is actually why I really like HTMX, you load a page once, then make AJAX requests that return html which you can use to replace or add to the DOM. It provides an interactive front end where the backend provides full rendered html partials. Simplifies the entire application by keeping logic and state only on the server, which means you never have to worry about synchronizing front-end and backed state.

SPAs are mostly garbage, and the internet has been irreparably damaged by lazy devs chasing trends just to building simple sites with overly complicated fe frameworks.

90% of the internet actually should just be rendered server side with a bit of js for interactivity. JQuery was fine at the time, Javascript is better now and Alpinejs is actually awesome. Nowadays, REST w/HTMX and HATEOAS is the most productive, painless and enjoyable web development can get. Minimal dependencies, tiny file sizes, fast and simple.

Unless your web site needs to work offline (it probably doesn’t), or it has to manage client state for dozen/hundreds of data points (e.g. Google Maps), you don’t need a SPA. If your site only needs to track minimal state, just use a good SSR web framework (Rails, asp.net, Django, whatever).