I love these new additions because I like new stuff but I'll admit it's hard to keep up and use things with good taste. C# is becoming a BIG language similar to C++. But I guess that's the only way to get a broad user base long term.
Yes. And they're on roughly the same trajectory: start out as a relatively small object-oriented and procedural language, and then just keep piling on more and more and more features to make the procedural programming more ergonomic. Including by pulling in more and more stuff from functional programming.
On the one hand, it's hard for me to dislike adding pattern matching too much, because I do tend to prefer functional programming. On the other hand, I'm also familiar enough with OOP (it's been most my career) to know that there's a huge overlap between problems that pattern matching can solve, and problems that dynamic dispatch can solve.
The thing is, in these examples of using pattern matching in a language like C# or Python, I never see anyone even considering the object-oriented solution to the problem. They just show how gross the procedural version is. Which isn't quite enough in my book. You don't just want to show that some existing language features are a poor fit for the problem at hand, you want to show that all existing language features are a poor fit. And somehow, despite these being object-oriented languages, the object-oriented solution is never even being considered anymore.
Is it because OOP is that bad? Or is it because we've been badly taught? I know which answer is easier to argue for, but I'm less and less convinced that that's because it's the best answer.
If you imagine implementing a handler chain, the logic would be quite verbose and distributed. You might want to use an inline type definition. Then you might want to use an anonymous types, then lambdas.
Then you realize that pattern matching is just a sugared version of the OO handler chain.
Handlers are useful for some more complex use cases, as is the visitor pattern, but they're frankly overused. It's often enough to create an interface and let the classes handle their own class-specific logic.
And polymorphism is not just a sugared version of pattern matching. Each gives you a different kind of flexibility. Polymorphism makes it easy to add new types to an existing set of operations, and pattern matching makes it easier to add new operations to an existing set of types.
Which one you need depends on your use case. The common knowledge can get a bit tricky here, though. For example, functional programming is often touted as being ideal for programming language experimentation, because you have pattern matching, but I have found that OOP is more to my taste in this area. The reason is because, nowadays, the set of basic operations a compiler or interpreter needs to do is fairly well-established and static. But the list of things you need to operate on - that is, the set of features in the language you're implementing - will change as you add or remove features from the language.
Written in a pattern-matching style there is a nicer correspondence between code-locality and execution-locality - which matches my mental model much more nicely, rather than OOP's colocation of different behaviors on the same entity
https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/api/system.numerics....
Also, I’m kind of on the fence about Go. I was charmed by how easy it is to read and their error handling strategy admittedly has benefits. But it is awfully tedious to write.
I prefer Go immeasurably. All of the same scope is achievable, but I'm not constantly assaulted by new syntax, unwieldy OO hierarchy towers of Babel, or broken data frameworks.
foo, err := DoIt() if err != nil { return err }
is a small price to pay for sane control flow in the presence of exceptions. I can debug code in Vim without needing Reflector and Visual Studio to make sense of what I'm looking at.
Every time I hear someone say something like this, I have a mental image of people manhandling 200kg crates while the forklift sits idle because they can't be bothered learning how to drive it.
Reminds me of that multi-million dollar German-made road resurfacing machine that sat unused in some US city because the road crew thought it was too complicated to learn. Sure... they'd have to read the manual and learn to operate it, but that would only save millions of dollars in labour!
you can be productive on the first tasks in any language. that is a stupid pitch. bad code can be written in any language, especially in golang. I've seen as many bad code in golang than in other languages. and fixing bad code in golang is way worse than in some other languages.