Ask HN: Can we just take a moment to appreciate how elegant C# is? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Can we just take a moment to appreciate how elegant C# is?

10 pointspipeline_peak10 comments

var list = Enumerable.Range(0, 20).Select(i => new { Foo = i, Bar = "hey" });

This is beautiful!

Isn't this every language now? Apart from the anonymous type even Java can do it elegantly:

    var lst = IntStream.range(0, 20)
        .map(i -> Pair.of(i, "hey"))
        .toList();

~ 40 years ago, Smalltalk had:

(1 to: 20) collect: [ :each | Array with: each with: 'hey' ]

And Smalltalk got it from Lisp.

Just saying for comparison.

Edit: forgot to mention - the syntax is entirely consistent and unlike Linq does not seem bolted on to the rest of the language.

Javascript does that too with its ES6 chaining syntax, would you say it is elegant too?

var list = Array.from({length:20}, (_, i)=>({"Foo":i+1, "Bar": "hey"}))

Elegant, I would say so myself. Does the underscore represent the list?

For my understanding, what is happening in "new { Foo = i, Bar = "hey" }"? Is that some type of tuple or struct or something?

Anyway I agree, I like C# for the same reasons I like Java. Very readable but still powerful.

That is an anonymous type. They cannot be returned explicitly, but you can instead use "(Foo: i, Bar: "hey")" to return a tuple with properties (int Foo, string Bar)

This is Linq (and anonymous types). There are ports of Linq for other languages and a lot languages have similar features. It is nice though.

Linq is definitely my favorite feature of C#

In Elixir:

list = Enum.map(1..20, & %{foo: &1, bar: "hey"})

Not meant to be a comparison, just another example

Kotlin to get a List<Pair<Int, String>>

val list = (1..20).map { Pair(it, "hey") }

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