Hacker News Reader

Comment by seanwilson | Hacker News Reader

> If they want to "learn" about generics perhaps they can read the literature of the past 30yrs and look at how other languages have adopted those learnings: Java, C#, Haskell, OCaml and Coq.

Yeah, I find it strange how languages are trending at a glacially slow pace to having the same features that strongly typed functional programming languages have had for literally decades. It's like we're going to be using actual functional programming languages eventually but the only way it'll happen is to very slowly change what everyone is currently using in small steps.

Static types, immutability, type inference and non-null variables are popular design choices right now but they've been in functional programming languages for nearly 50 years. I'm still waiting for inductive types and pattern matching to turn up in a mainstream language and seeing them talked about like they're new concepts.

View on HN

C# is adding pattern matching in the upcoming release, and to your point, people are acting like it's the new hotness.

That's not exactly surprising, the C# community has been doing that since the beginning of the language, anything not in the language is pointless academic wankery, and as soon as Microsoft announces it it's the best innovation in computing history since Microsoft was created.

Source: got to interact with the community between the C# 1.0 and 4.0 releases (2.0 added generics, 3.0 added lambdas, neither feature was considered of any use to a Productive Developer up to the day when Microsoft officially announced them).

> That's not exactly surprising, the C# community has been doing that since the beginning of the language, anything not in the language is pointless academic wankery, and as soon as Microsoft announces it it's the best innovation in computing history since Microsoft was created.

That isn't true inside Microsoft. Many of the people who work on C# are the same academic wanks that work on Scala or F#. C# has a different user base from those languages though, so they still have to be careful what they add to the language, and many language features are planned 3 or 4 versions in advance.

> That isn't true inside Microsoft.

No, that was not intended as included in "the C# community". Hell, SPJ used to work at Microsoft (he may still do, but he used to).

> the people who work on C# are the same academic wanks that work on Scala or F#

I'm sure you mean wonks, but I liked the typo.

> C# has a different user base from those languages though, so they still have to be careful what they add to the language, and many language features are planned 3 or 4 versions in advance.

I have no issue with the evolution of C# rate or otherwise, only with a number of its users.

Ugh, that was bad embarrassing typo.

C# has a specific audience, and the language designers cater to them pretty well. I really really like C# as a language, and I don't mind delayed access to certain features that I already like from other languages.

You probably have a beef with some C# users not because of their choice of language, but with the field they work in (primarily enterprise) tends to breed a certain kind of attitude that other techies don't like very much.

Clearly they finally learned the lessons of Apple. Old is busted, new is perfect.

(says a man planning to purchase his 5th Macbook Pro later this year)

It is new to C#, which is slowly catching up to Scala and F# in that regards. Mads Torgesen is good friends with Martin Odersky, in fact, when I first met Mads back in 2006 or so, they were talking about adding pattern matching to C#. C# is a much more conservative language, and it makes sense it would take a while to add.

There are good reasons to use C#, so when it gets a new feature that other languages have had for years, well, it is newsworthy.

Now when will javascript get pattern matching?

There's a proposal for it! Stage 0? Stage 1? Don't remember what stage it's in off the top of my head, but it looks promising.

It's just become a Stage 0 proposal: https://github.com/tc39/proposal-pattern-matching

Woo hoo, can't wait. Especially with what TypeScript can do with this.

There is a paper, Pizza into Java: Translating theory into practice, from Odersky and Wadler at POPL 97 about how to mix generics, lambda and pattern matching in a Java like language.

C# and Java are slowly catching up :)

I think the reason for that enthusiasm is not so much that it's the new hotness (although it is some people's first encounter with the idea), but that it's now available in a mainstream language that their employer will actually let them use (in about five years when they finally bother upgrading Visual Studio).

Surely if Go is considered mainstream so is Swift?

strange how languages are trending at a glacially slow pace

Human behaviour is strange when you expect rationality. Sour grapes is such a pervasive cognitive bias that one has to wonder why it exists since it's obviously irrational. I think it's likely that it presents a major advantage in the psychology of group cohesion.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com