Calvin Austin's Blog

C# The saga continues and a testing competition

So back in July I was casting for ideas to write about and after an amount of googling the news saw a tiny data point hidden in a forrester report that C# only had 15% of the enterprise marketshare. That report took me back to when C# was launched. The press was reporting that it would essentially be the end of Java, and even a Microsoft employee told me in as many words that Java's days were numbered. I think I replied that we would do the best that we could do and listen to what the Java community really wanted. To be honest this was a low ball shot, it was someone I trusted and respected and I had to dig deep.

So now that predicted death didn't occur in the first 5 years why no update? Not only could I not find many other references to this report but no-one seems to be talking about it in the press. A couple of bloggers like Angsuman have noticed but thats it. If Java was in the same position it would be all over the headlines. Even skipping through Microsofts website there isn't really much in the way of promotion of C# the language at all, many visual studio pages had more references to C++ that C#. It is all .NET and Visual Studio.

Apart from the flood of .NET supporters who were focused on that I said there "has been a 2.0" and I should have said "2.0 is over a year late and Microsoft don't currently ship a version of the official C# 2.0 standard". But I digress. I started to receive emails from other readers who have been battling their own C# vs Java or more .Net vs JEE at their own workplace. Who is sticking up for Java in these situations? I really don't know, its just the technology having to speak for itself. Some of the more vocal champions and evangelists at Sun are now focused on netbeans vs eclipse but surely this opens the door to a competing technology? If I was at Microsoft I would be encouraging more competition between netbeans and eclipse, a community divided is easier to conqueror.

On a brighter note, Spikesource is running a testing competition! You don't get to see many of those, and the goal is to help foster participatory testing. The prize pool is $20,000, and all you have to do is write some test code! More details are here Open Testing Contest.

Comments

• Roger Brinkley's blog prompts me to ask twp questions:

  What percentage of enterprises are using .Net?
  
  What percentage of enterprises that use .Net are are also using C#?

  --John

  Posted by: johnreynolds on August 26, 2005 at 11:52 AM

• What percentage of enterprises that use .NET are also using Java, for that matter?

  Posted by: richunger on August 26, 2005 at 12:38 PM

• I still have the link from the report. For those using .NET 58% are using VB.NET or C#. Based on his ratio maths for overall stats, that is 25% of .NET users are using C#. Microsoft probably doesn't care about that because it just means another .NET licensee

  http://www.forrester.com/Research/Document/Excerpt/0,7211,37356,00.html

  Posted by: calvinaustin on August 26, 2005 at 01:52 PM

• Thanks for the additional stats Calvin,

  It does look like C# is no Java killer, but maybe the wider picture is that no single language is going to dominate.

  If there's no knockout between VB and C# in .Net land, then I think it's a pretty safe bet that our JVM world is going to see a wide mix of Groovy and Java (and Jython etc.).

  What an icky mess to have to deal with, but just like human languages, we're all going to have to be multilingual to be truly effective.

  --John

  Posted by: johnreynolds on August 29, 2005 at 06:34 AM

• Those figures are no surprise at all for me. I see only a subset of diehard Microsoft developers adopting .NET and C#. I saw it make no inroads into Java developes, even into PowerBuilder, Oracle Forms, or PHP space.

  If only 58% of those using .NET are using either C# or VB.NET, what are the remaining 42% using? Maybe this "remaining" has the "dominant" language of the .NET area, and I'd like to know who it is. Delphi? Perl? Visual Fox? Umanaged C++ code? Legacy VB code (which I think is not .NET at all)? ASP.NET (I think it should be counted alongside VB.NET, but others may disagree)?

  It would also be interesting to know if a noticeable percentage of the .NET users are actually Mono users. Or, conversely, if a significant amount of the C# developers are not .NET developers, but Mono developers. And, among those Mono users, how many are IKVM users, that is, Java developers. :-)

  Posted by: flozano on August 29, 2005 at 03:19 PM

• But if there was no compitition in the IDE space then there is a reason lesser to inovate much. So I think compitition in the IDE space is good, both for Eclipse and Netbeans and other Java IDE's.
  Just like in the webbrowser space.

  Posted by: carmello on August 30, 2005 at 01:33 AM

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