Well, for plain old websites Ruby on Rails I think is on par with ASP.NET MVC.

For Web API maybe Go is a reasonable contender if you put up with the boiler plate and verbosity.

As for mobile apps, I didn't encounter anything as productive as Xamarin while being reasonably multiplatform.

I didn't do desktop apps since ages but I remember QT and Embarcadero's C++ builder as being quite productive.

But one platform to do it all? There isn't other. Javascript is today used everywhere but I wouldn't quite qualify it as productive or performant. And countless frameworks and libraries competing with each other kind of makes it a mess.

Agreed, the versatility, as a mostly first class language across domains is awesome!

On the RoR comparison, while coding speed is similar, Blazor is an advancement, and then the runtime perf of .Net 6 vs RoR means having less servers, less cost, and less scaling challenges!

Techempower round 20 has ASP.NET at 309,458, compared to RoR at 8,260. That is 37 TIMES faster for .NET. Think of that as 37 times as much AWS bill for your RoR startup ..

https://www.techempower.com/benchmarks/

JavaScript is productive once you stop listening to all the high level abstracts and complications. Vanilla JavaScript is beautiful and highly productive. Right up there with c# for server side ops.

As someone who has only written Node/TypeScript and C# backends in the last 10 years, I couldn't disagree more.

Node has so few "batteries included" that you spend a ridiculous amount of time searching npm.

That's especially bad because Node's ecosystem is a graveyard. There are 3-10 libraries for everything, and (if you're lucky) one will be well-tested and maintained. And even then, you're very rarely going to find something that's also: 1) maintained by more than one person, 2) used in production by well-funded developers, and 3) able to keep up with their Github bug reports.

In some cases, I have to try 2-3 libraries before picking one and often switch to another one later.

.NET, on the other hand, has a great ecosystem, batteries included, and (if needed) usually a commercial library for the really important stuff. It's just a far more stable and serious ecosystem in general.

Vanilla Javascript is productive until you reach a certain size of the project. After that the bugs will kill you. You will lose more time hunting bugs then writing code.

And that is not Javascript's fault because it was never intended to be anything else that a small script language to interact with DOM in a web page and add a bit of interactivity to HTML.

There does seem to be some cultural inertia from the gap between when people made all the new frameworks and extensions to make JavaScript keep up with the advance of the web and when JavaScript got most of that functionality built in. CSS has the same issue where people don't realize it does most of what frameworks were made for originally like grids and changes based on medium/resolution/etc.

I think it's the curse of web development. It's so hard to keep up with all the brand new technology changes, so once you know the basics well enough you rarely take much time to look back at them. And Googling "how to create a grid" feels kind of redundant if you've already found a reasonable effective way to do it.

All these new features are nice, but not all users are using the latest browsers, so we have to keep falling back on these frameworks

The only scenarios I can think of where someone hasn't been on an auto-updating browser for 10+ years is embedded systems and locked down intranets where no one expects the latest and greatest, and people in circumstances where a minimal page not top-heavy with scripts and frameworks is best.

Have you ever worked for a bank?

Me too I had Java envy, but now I realize a choice of 20 different frameworks doesn't make anything easier.