How does C# compare to Clojure, at which I am looking lately a lot with a wish to use it for distributed applications productivity-wise, concurrency-wise and productivity-wise, including deployments in production?
C# and Clojure are probably my two favorite languages, but I've done much much less Clojure in production, and for my personal disposition C# is my overall favorite.
For bread-and-butter concurrency (make a bunch of external service calls at once, collect them up and do something) you've got async/await, but you probably knew that.
Some other things you might look into as far as distributed/parallel libraries/frameworks go:
- Orleans, a framework for using an actor model in C# to build distributed systems
- TPL Dataflow (Task Parallel Library), a lib for composing "blocks" to create parallel dataflow graphs
Productivity wise, the tooling for C# imo is pretty top notch, and I'd just be repeating what the article said.
Something I radically prefer about Clojure is the LISP heritage of highly interactive debugging and app dev. You can get great feedback loops with C#, but it won't be what you can do with Clojure and Calva or Cursive (is cursive still a thing? it's been awhile)
On the other hand, I personally prefer strongly typed languages, especially with C#, because of how good some of the static analysis and refactoring tooling can get in things like Rider (a JetBrains IDE for C#).
I think deployments are going to be a toss up. For my money Go is still the gold standard of "just make a binary and chuck it out there" and Clojure and C# are more normal "once you're used to it, it's completely fine, but it won't blow you away"
