Learning Haskell/Python makes you a worse C# programmer

    string.Join("\n",
        from elem in myList
        where elem.Description != ""
        select elem.Description);

   "\n".join(foo.description() for foo in mylist
                         if foo.description() != "")

in c#3.0 we write

  string.Join("\n", mylist.Select(x=>x.Description()).Where(x=>x != "").ToArray());

  string.Join("\n", mylist.Select(x=>x.Description()).Where(x=>x != ""));

You can even remove functional from the sentence. Powerful features of languages like Python and Lisp don't get you more power than languages like Java. They give you more power per unit of effort.

Python didn't drag my day job down. Instead, it gives me the understanding of what Java's shortcomings are and why IDEs and frameworks exist to cope with them.

It also changed the way I looked at design patterns. Before I knew Python, they were pretty intimidating. Now, I look at a strategy pattern implementation and find it more a cute attempt to compensate for something than anything else.

But if you've learned a whole range of languages you'll try to come up with more elegant solution. He tried that, but as gecko pointed out the errors were not in trying, but rather in his results.

I work in a C# dev house now, and boy what is considered a good solution there (and in their contractors works) is so sad I don't even know what to call it.

But then, you look at the latest c# version and it has quite a few interesting features, people just don't use it. My guess is that they've just been doing it since c# 2.0. And the fact that c# is not really made for web development, which is what it seems to be most taught doesn't really help either.

  join "\n", map { $_->{description} } grep { $_->{description} ne "" } @mylist;

C# has a tremendous potential for functional programming. There's some features that make a pure functional style easier and prettier in haskell, but C# has plenty of potential.

The title is total link bait. I clicked because I know there are things to write about - like pervasive nulls and mutable-by-default variables to begin with. There really are things to complain about! But the actual contents of the article are infuriatingly obtuse.

The fact that 39 people found this interesting in 2012 just demonstrates how ineffective the entire hacker news concept really is.

I like using functional methods in Java to implement DSLs but the guava docs are right when they say you shouldn't be ashamed to use a for loop from time to time in Java.

In this case, just using C# a bit more idiomatically can go a long way:

  var descriptions = new ArrayList(mylist.Length);
  foreach (var foo in myList)
  {
    if (foo.Description == "") { continue; }
    descriptions.Add(foo.Description);
  }
  return String.Join("\n", descriptions);