C# is a great language, in fact, I believe it's the best "general language", if there ever was one. The only real problem C# has is it's bad support of non-Windows platforms. As a language, it's excellent.

Xamarin

ahh no good! C# + X-Platform = #Remarkable

   C# is a language with a somewhat limited market 
   ("Enterprise" applications running on Windows Servers,
   and yes, I know about Mono)

One would think that Windows Phone - fastest growing smartphone OS - would go before Mono... geez, I make a living out of desktop C# apps (WPF). Not solely, but on a daily basis.

Fastest growing is easier to achieve when you have low market share.

Mono is significantly more important for the future of C# than Windows Phone.

You can make it even easier by pretending old versions of your mobile OS don't count. Or at least it appears you're allowed to do this if you left all your prior mobile users high & dry after promising them upgrades, twice.

"Easier" doesn't mean easy - many players to the table, we are yet to see whether Tizen or Firefox OS manage to pull that easy feat.

What makes you think Mono plays (or is about to play) such a pivotal role?

I would be interested to know what these apps are? Who buys them? Where do you sell them? I never found a decent place to sell WPF desktop apps.

I've actually worked at 2 startups using C# and been contacted by 2 others in the last year trying to poach talent. C# is popular in many contexts.

The same goes for me! My first job was at a startup that used ASP.NET with C# (with PHP for micro-sites). From there, I've worked at agencies where I've built both large sites and small sites using ASP.NET and C#.

The whole notion of .NET only being suitable for enterprise development is bullshit.

It's not that it is only ever used for enterprise, just that it seems to be mostly used for enterprise. Think of the licensing costs for visual studio, sqlserver and windows server. Sure there is the Bizspark, but it runs out, and I think most founders would be squeamish with the potential business-technical debt that would represent.

At least right now, MS is still seen (although less lately) like the Big Bad, so giving them money to use what you can get for free or near-free elsewhere seems uncool and like bad business sense.

I suspect too from my own extremely limited sample size that .NET developers make more money on average than the average of the other languages, so that is also a liability when looking for talent when you have limited cash.

Actually, in my experience, I'd say that while .NET is used in enterprise, it's mostly used by small businesses. My experience is mainly within .NET based CMS's, and I've worked for a few agencies and startups that build on .NET, sometimes amongst other things.

I've never really bought the argument that building for .NET is too expensive. Yes, it's a lot more expensive than free, but for a company it's peanuts when it guarantees the company a stable platform and a growing dev market. The only people that will be priced out are bootstrappers. I've built more small-business sites on Umbraco than I can count.

I worked professionally on VS Express for quite a while. Yes it's less convenient, but it can be done. Still a better IDE than (say) NetBeans. I know it's apples and oranges, but I'm speaking about an overall impression.

You should check out Intellij. http://www.jetbrains.com/idea/

I think its free version is still better than most paid VS editions. The $500 edition is the best IDE I've seen. And it supports basically every language but the three .NET languages.

I know, it's very good. I use Android Studio and PHPStorm, both are mutations of Idea.

"Think of the licensing costs for visual studio, sqlserver and windows server."

Think of the costs of paying your developers. Those things are a pittance compared to the cost of hiring and retaining good developers.

Shrug, your costs might be different, but 13k per developer per year is hardly a pittance compared to my salary. I'd much rather have 13k in my pocket or in awesome stuff like monitors, desk, keyboard, etc.

In what world are you paying 13k per developer for year to use Microsoft products? Top of the line MSDN sub is like ~3k, and we get good desks and monitors and keyboards and computers too. Most places don't even buy MSDN, I do fine with a <1k in software to develop on .NET.

I got that price right off their site, top line Ultimate (only slightly less feature rich then Intellij IDEA) clocks in roughly $12500 more than IDEA.

http://www.visualstudio.com/en-us/products/how-to-buy-vs

Then most drop another couple hundred to make it actually have some of the cool Intellij IDEA features by adding in Resharper. I'm not trying to hate, I use VS at work, just I can see why it's not a popular startup ecosystem.

I don't know how that price is arrived at but it's totally not realistic. I would expect to spend ~1.5K on VS2013 Professional plus associated dev. tools (R#, dotTrace etc).

Just yesterday morning (oh the timing) I shook my fists in rage after discovering the long awaited Fakes system for mocking static functions is only available in the Ultimate edition. An actual language feature, restricted to the 13k edition. Shrug, I had that in php 5 years ago...

What I don't get is: if people aren't even buying the top line IDE to use all its features, and are just buying the crappy subset IDEs, why use .NET at all? Where's the value proposition over Java/Scala? It runs on fewer architectures, the language is only mildly better than Java and certainly not better than Scala, and the long promoted IDE has less features and is exorbitantly overpriced. I just don't get it. Is it just inertia at this point? The question in my mind isn't: "why are so few startups using it?" It's "why is anyone still picking that as their business's main stack?"

I know my team is currently locked in to agreements with other companies who require it (naturally). So when a new customer wants our stuff, they have to handle it. Is that the main reason? Everyone using it is in a circle of dependence?

Oh I forgot to mention, the functionality of Fakes used to be free, but in the new iteration it no longer is, so they can squeeze a few more 13k editions.

That really cracks me up! I work in C# probably 80% of the year (python and shudder vbscript make up the remainder) and I use lambda statements, implicit typing, and anonymous functions almost every day. The Linq IEnumerable<> extensions are also pretty well indispensable for me. My biggest complaint with C# is the limitations imposed by the static typing system: anonymous functions can't be generic, so you're forced to either declare delegates or explicitly declare each of your anon signatures; and KeyValuePair<> and Tuple<> both force you into sometimes excruciatingly, comically long object declarations, eg

Tuple<string, IEnumerable<string>, IEnumerable<KeyValuePair<string, bool>>

I've come to a point where I can comfortably write functional code in the language (though I should stress that I don't write "pure" functional code; I don't fall into the camp that abhors side effects in all scenarios). Day to day, it really is a fine language to work in, notwithstanding a few warts. In all honesty though, I'd rather be working in Python or a LISP most of the time

For me, LINQ was definitely a "gateway feature" to the lisp world. If you still use C# at work, I strongly suggest checking out F#: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7048522

You're not giving mono the credit it's due.

I think Mono is great. It's just not a big market but of course it has great potential.

It's in other places too. It's just hiding itself very well. For example Unity and the games that are based on it: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Unity_Engine_games