> Rust isn't popular

Fair enough - it's more fashionable that popular :-) It did close TIOBE's top 20 for 2022: https://www.tiobe.com/tiobe-index/ (and that includes non-general-purpose languages)

... but you're right in that I could have probably chosen Go or TypeScript. The point is that Java is not remotely the latest popular general-purpose programming language.

> C# isn't general-purpose

It is, see definition: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General-purpose_programming_la...

> and the other two are older than Java.

Javascript was named after Java... see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JavaScript

As for Python - you're technically right, but it only became popular after Java already was.

I am curious, why do you think C# is less general-purpose than Java?

I think they mean that C# is (or has been until fairly recently) Windows-only.

Then they'd be wrong. .net was released in 2000; Mono was 1.0 by 2004, and IIRC was usable as early as late 2002. Put another way, for almost the entire lifetime of .net (19 out of 23 years), C# has been usable on linux.

Yet the open-source community didn't build anything useful at scale on mono/C#. The C# community has still little to compete with Java when building large scale backend applications. I will love to have alternates to Hadoop, Spark, Kafka and other top Apache projects.

C# could have been much more if Microsoft collaborated with other open-source projects instead of actively fighting and killing them by offering the same functionality natively. All this for having a much tighter control over the ecosystem.

For most of its history, Mono was buggy, lagging behind, and slow. It was only ever a solution of last resort, if you absolutely had to migrate an existing Windows app to another platform.

Microsoft tried to push it a bit once they bought it for cross-platform mobile dev (back when Windows Phone was still a thing), but that never took off to any extent either.