I think the author is saying they have no idea why C# and Java devs are worse on average than Ruby and Go devs. I'm sure they know the specific reason those devs fail, but are trying to understand the more general trends that lead to higher rates of failure. I would guess that this is another instance of the python paradox (http://www.paulgraham.com/pypar.html).
We’ve been a C# house since .net 2.0 and having recently moved a lot of our things to first JS and then python I think it’s the tooling.
Visual studio does a lot of things for you without a CLI. Want to deploy? Right click on your project and do the UI wizard for it. I mean, even nuget has a gui.
On top of that C# comes with a ton of easy to use features from its library. Like AD integration is just a library that gives you everything you need, at least until it doesn’t and you have to write your own bits and things get hard, but until then everything is easy and it’s much easier than using an open source library for it. I think any C# programmer could use its basic functionality from VS without ever looking at its documentation, and while Django and flask integrates with AD as well, you can’t really say the same thing about them.
You don’t get that with most tools. Ironically I think the fact that .net core has moved to a more CLI sort of environment has made visual studio a worse option for it than visual studio code, but we aren’t really going down that road, so what do I care.
I do care about python support for visual studio code, and it’s damned awesome.
I think you are correct here, but also consider what a typical Java and C# programmer's are developing, they are writing line-of-business application's they are not data-mining, or doing a lot with algorithm's.
As you implied they are also less typically less exposed to doing the low level thing, however no one will test you if you can use the EntityFramework in the IDE while everyone will test if you can use SqlConnection, Open , Execute a query and parse the result "by hand"
I think that would explain why they aren’t performing on par with python developers. I also think a lot of python developers started with C, and that typically makes you a better programmer, because if you’ve suffered through memory allocation and finding the paths of least resistance, you’ll never forget.
I don’t see why JAVA or C# should perform worse than JavaScript developers in terms of data structures or algorithms though. Documentation, CLI and environment, sure, but building things?
You could say something similar about go, but I think people who are choosing go, are choosing go. And by that I mean they are thinking about their options, most C# developers that I have known, simply throw C# at everything, even when they shouldn’t.
I use C# and Visual Studio a lot and I think it really makes me dumber. In my C/C++ days I used to be really good at reading docs and quickly setting up configurations but now I am used to the IDE doing a lot of handholding. I am some work with node now and I notice that in this environment you have to know the command line and read a lot because things are less polished.
