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Comment by gboss | Hacker News Reader

Slightly tangential but I really like Linq syntax. The only problem I have with it is that it is really hard to debug if there is a logic error. I often see developers write linq find out the record set they get back is incorrect and then break up the linq query to a nested if clause to get what they want.

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I've seen so many errors around orderby/limit. which most people want at the end, but linq lets them define it, everywhere. (for a good reason) but this is probably the biggest problem with linq, it's a chain of operators that are ORDER dependant!!

That's a quality of tooling issue. And in Visual Studio, for example, you can set breakpoints on individual subexpressions in the query.

Yeah I feel like that happens whenever you have a mapping from one language to another. Eventually you learn the intricacies of the transformation. There are very few situations where the Linq I write does not translate into the query I expect any more. But that took time to learn.

The only criticism I have of Linq is that it is a more general language targeting different back-ends including plain old objects. If Linq did not allow things that do not make sense in SQL this would be a little less jarring.

I also wish it supported full outer joins, unions, and window functions.

I was amazed the first time I used the MongoLinq driver. It makes sense intuitively, but the idea that you can use the same Linq expression and it will be translated to either Sql or MongoQuery based on the provider you send it to was amazing.

I was able to hire a four or five contractors who never used Mongo just by requiring Entity Framework/Linq experience and less than 4 hours of training.

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