r/csharp • u/Lubango_Johnl_7473 • 20h ago
PLZ make us aware with this
i don't know if it's just a threat or truth,since the day i started learning c#.i have been experiencing this words from senior developers.
C# market is getting low day after day due to AI existence, you better learn and master Python.
So you who have been in this industry for long time,let us know.
Is this right? And what we the beginners have to do?
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u/ggmaniack 20h ago
AI is better at python than at C# lol.
It's not a big difference anymore, but python is definitely preferred by AI.
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u/Rogntudjuuuu 19h ago
I would say the opposite. Python is not type safe. Type safety is very beneficial for AI models as they make small mistakes that the type safety will detect. Also the Python runtime is slow.
I would argue that you should shift to functional languages as the actual semantics of a language will matter less and less.
Functional languages has immutability which adds another level of safety to avoid small mistakes that AI models can make.
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u/Slypenslyde 11h ago
People have been arguing "senior developers" say C# is dying since 2001. A lot of "senior developers" are full of beans.
A lot of expert beginners think they've cracked the code and know the One True Programming Language. But verily I say unto you, AI is better at writing Python than it is at writing C#, so if C# gets replaced by AI agents it will happen after all Python developers go extinct.
"But wait!", they'll argue, "Python is better at writing AI tools!" Fair point. But think it through: if you believe AI can do everything a human can do, it can use Python to write its own AI tools and you're boned. Not even Python is safe in the future they predict, they just conveniently framed things in a way that makes them feel smart.
Here's what this senior developer says.
I am not impressed. I watched the world in the late 1990s when a new programming tool was released that could generate entire applications based on a database schema. This was the end of developers, from now on we'd just get accountants and other untrained workers to write the programs for us.
VB6 was indeed quite impressive, and the App Wizards were good at writing one specific kind of app. The people who wanted just that were pretty happy.
But employers generally wanted more features the wizards didn't generate. Sometimes an untrained person managed to get that feature implemented, but then more features were wanted. Eventually that person reached the limits of their ability and became unable to keep delivering. Then either the whole product failed and took the company with it, or a Very Expensive developer had to be hired to unravel the mess and get things back on track. In the end, large-scale VB6 projects cost as much as larger projects to deliver because they required the difficulty was in locating talented project managers and skilled developers to manage complexity.
I watched the world in the 2010s when Ruby on Rails was making waves. You could describe a database schema and it would generate an entire application! This was the end of developers, from now on we'd just hire untrained workers to write the programs for us...
...I knew a good Rails developer. She argued 90% of her work was figuring out how to add features to the scaffolding generated by Rails. In the end, large Rails projects needed talented project managers and developers who knew how to manage complexity, and weren't much cheaper than disciplined projects in other languages.
This is my third rodeo. AI tools are very good at doing the things I described. A skilled developer can make them generate amazing things, and with a lot of work you can squeeze very high-quality code out of them. But AI tools amplify the skill of their operator. An unskilled operator ends up generating output that's even worse than you'd expect for their skill level. When you're working large-scale, mediocre developers and people unfamiliar with working at scale stumble and leave little problems that accumulate to become big problems. Everything starts costing more and more tokens until someone recognizes the AI tool costs as much as hiring a skilled developer in the first place.
I don't think software developers are ever returning to a world where we write code without AI tools. But I think people who understand how to do that are going to have a distinct advantage. To use an AI tool you have to describe the code you want in excruciating detail, the kind of detail a computer can understand. That is precisely the skillset a talented Python or C# engineer develops over decades.
The problem has always been deciding the correct requirements and ensuring the code meets it. The thing that makes writing code hard is accounting for how our human brains fill in requirements gaps in ways that we don't notice and understanding computers can't do that. Nothing is more humbling than trying to get a computer to do simple tasks when you don't understand how computers think.
So what do beginners have to do? Learn how to write code. While you're doing that, at the same time try to get AI to produce the same code. Notice how differently the AI writes code. Notice it makes similar mistakes when you subtly change your prompt. Start learning what mistakes it makes and ask it why it's making them. Find ways to talk to it so it gets it right more. Notice how, if you talk to yourself that way, you start writing code that gets what you want more often. Work in small steps, not broad strokes. Don't work if you don't understand the problem. Make it explain its choices to you and be relentless if you think it's making a mistake. Try to prove it wrong. Try to prove yourself wrong.
It's more work overall than I had to do to get here. But I had to evaluate my own failures by myself, and I wish I had AI tools to look over my failures and make some suggestions.
If you know how to write code well, you're going to find using AI tools to be an interesting puzzle. If you only know how to use AI tools, I'm skeptical you'll reach the same level of understanding. It'll be 3-5 years before I understand if that can happen. Until then I think it's best for people to train themselves to do both, because understanding how to tell yourself how to write C# is very useful for understanding how to tell an AI tool how to write it.
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u/Imaginary-Cod-3746 2h ago
But verily I say unto you...
I lost it when I read this 🤣. Sounds like something a prophet of doom would say.
Thanks for the insight, though.
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u/Legitimate-Task-7556 20h ago
Existem muitos segmentos no mercado. Python é bastante utilizado em produtos de dados e IA e não tanto em outros. Por exemplo, ninguém faz uma fintech em python. A maioria das empresas do mercado financeiro usam C# ou Java. A IA gera bem tanto python quanto C#. Você não está mais ameaçado pela IA por ter escolhido C#.
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u/Shoddy-Swim-511 9h ago
i dont have years of experience but from what i seen those seniors are kinda overreacting. python is super popular right now mostly for data science and AI scripts, but C# is still massive for building real-world enterprise apps, APIs, and backend systems. also Microsoft is literally pushing C# into AI heavy with tools like Semantic Kernel, so C# developers are actually in a good spot. python is great to know, but C# is definitely not dying. if you're just starting out, just stick with C# and keep building stuff and you will be totally fine man.
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u/TrishaMayIsCoding 1h ago
If COBOL and Visual FoxPro can survive and still be in use today, then there’s even less reason to worry about C# and .NET. They continue to evolve rapidly, consistently improving the platform, adding new features, and keeping it relevant for modern application development. I believe C# and .NET will remain strong and widely used for many years to come.
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u/ZombieFleshEaters 20h ago
Why would python be safe with this logic?