It is becoming way to loose in a sense and it seems that it wants more than it should.
If you want to do functional programming, pick a fp language.
If you want to do dynamic typed programming pick a dp language.
Sure you can mix some things in, but c# is becoming way to scattered imo. And it's not pretty i think.
On the more substantive changes, it feels a little like the language designers have been looting F#.
Combined with how fast Dotnet Core is moving and how many breaking changes there are there, it does feel like things are getting very fragmented.
Stasis isn't good either; just witness the decade or so of stagnation after Java 1.6 as the Sun -> Oracle transition happened. But you can go too far in the other direction.
Specifically, I just tried disabling 7.0+ features in an open source project I run, and we only actively used pattern matching for "is MyType inst", ref structs (hi Rust!, that one is really fundamental), and natively sized integers (which are still poorly supported by runtime).
Other sugar changes have uses across codebase you can count by fingers of one hand.
We also use unmanaged function pointers, but the feature appears ugly in many ways. For our purpose, I'd prefer a tiny bit more flexible DllImport (a hook to give it the dll path at runtime) over function pointers.
And it's not surprising that an existing large C# codebase wouldn't use many of those features. But for new projects, they are very nice.
C# 7
- value tuples
- local functions
- throw expressions
- default literals
- out variables
- switch expressions
- using declarations
- static local functions
- asynchronous streams
- null-coalescing assignment
- enhance string interpolation e.g. via @$ prefixI now find myself writing half my data processing in LINQ and find myself thankful that I can chain together a few methods on a collection with possible transformation in a line or two rather than having to write 2 or 3 nested loops with all sorts of conditionals.
I'm taking the new things that come up in C# as they come, and even the ones I don't care for, I generally end up using to some extent.
Go with the flow, or pick another language, would be my suggestion.