Comment on What programming languages aren't too criticized here?
Matthew@programming.dev 9 months ago
C# doesn’t have a big spotlight on it like Rust or Python, but it is a popular and very unhated language. It’s a good language that is regularly improving and has phenomenal documentation. Seriously, I’ve not gone to Stack Overflow for anything C# (outside of third-party libraries) for years; Microsoft’s documentation gives me everything I need.
It is incredible really, I worked with C# for so long, and I tend to be very critical of the stuff I’ve used for a long time. For C#, I am struggling to figure how I would improve it, because all the stuff that suck in C# is usually the lesser of two evils.
Of course if you hate classes, types, managed memory or anything invented in the last 20 years you will hate it, and I’ve met people like this. That is why you gotta keep learning as a dev, you don’t want to be one of those.
C# is missing discriminated unions, and it has a flawed async programming model. Namely, there are multiple models (for historical reasons / backwards compatibility), and the more current one (task-based) throws a wrench in your ability to effectively design interfaces, functions, delegates etc. that can be shared between synchronous and asynchronous code. Green threads would have fixed this, at the cost of some other potential issues, but it looks we’re stuck with tasks for now.
F# will give you discriminated unions and do-notation (it calls it ‘computational expressions’) while retaining full access to the .net ecosystem.
I really like ReactiveX for async programming, though having to go through a library is definitely a pain. It also does not make it less awkward to design your public API unless you’re okay exposing Rx types. Fair points!
kogasa@programming.dev 9 months ago
As a Linux user / human, obligatory fuck Microsoft. As a .NET dev, what they’ve done with C# is really great and it’s a very pleasant language and ecosystem to work with.