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"It seems as though the whole philosophy of .NET centres on catering to the novice... .NET, and specifically C#, both coddles you and then scolds you at every turn."

Perfect summary and exactly how I feel about .NET.

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I'm trying to figure out how a language which features reified generics, covariance and contravariance, lambdas, expressions-as-data, type inference, both static and dynamic types, reflection, and anonymous types could be considered by anyone as "catering to novices" or "coddling" you. Say what you want about MS, but C# is an incredibly powerful and expressive language.

The image in the link sums it up ("...all without writing a single line of code!", which I've heard personally in Microsoft events). It's not that the languages or the framework lack advanced features, it's that Microsoft/MVP's constantly tote the "beginner" features. I find C# to be very fun to code in... so long as you avoid anything that the tool will do (or only the tool can do) for you.

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