C# is the past, the present and the future | Hacker News Reader

C# is the past, the present and the future

blog.filipekberg.se

19 pointsfekberg56 comments

"I am a Software Engineer working with various techniques such as C#, WPF, WCF, ASP.NET MVC, ASP.NET and much more"

"I spend most of my days working with the latest technologies from Microsoft."

"In the darkest alley-ways we still have the people not wanting to touch C# with a pitch-fork because it’s behind Microsoft"

In my opinion he lacks enough neutrality to make that statements(how he know MS tech is so great if he is totally ignorant of other options?).

Instead of telling people to learn only Microsoft tech he could take his own advise and learn non Microsoft tech too. The world is much bigger than a single company.

In my work as a software engineer I had to use what was good for my company, not what was good for Microsoft, Apple, or any religion(GNU or whatever).

I had to use Java, C#, objective C, python, (and lisp and c and c++). We will never be in the hands of a single company ever.

You left out some of the about page where it says that I worked as a tutor in Java and C++. You're right that my about page doesn't contain all my resume. For your information I've worked with Java, Objective-C, Python, PHP, C++ and used Gentoo as a primary OS (for years). The blog and my current job is mostly .NET though which is why I highlight that in the about page.

One problem with your statement is that C# is not only "Microsoft tech". C# is an ECMA language for crying out loud.

Microsoft used Ecma as a standards repository, not a standards body. Ecma neither created nor endorsed C# - they received and recorded a standards submission from Microsoft thus making C# "Microsoft tech."

Finally, neither C# 3.0, 4.0 or 5.0 have been submitted to Ecma. So we can hardly refer to C# as an Ecma language for crying out loud! :)

I didn't say that ECMA created or endorsed C#. I said that it's an ECMA standard because no matter how much posturing anyone wants to do, it is one.

Features of C# 3.0 and 4.0 have too been included in the ECMA standard. So yes, we can definitely refer to C# as an ECMA language...for crying out loud. The standard is not updated as often as Microsoft or Mono release a new version of their runtime (ohnoes!), just like web standards when a browser Mfr. comes out with a new feature.

The article is very scarce on content. This could have been a tweet. Also, saying "C# was here to stay from the beginning, we love it in the present and we will use it more and more in the future." wouldn't convince many people.

In my view, the future of C# is hanging in the balance. Microsoft has lost significant mind share, and I am not sure if Windows is a good platform anymore to write new apps.

I have to agree, it occurred to me the other day that my almost one year old daughter might never have a Windows computer, in the same sense that people 10 years younger than me simply never had an MS-DOS one, except this time Microsoft didn't build the next platform.

Totally dude. Because C# only runs on Windows. You can't use it to build apps for the iPhone, Android, OS X or Linux at all. Nope.

Mono is an option for the current generation to learn one less language. Outside of Windows it's not the default language for anything except Unity3d so curious kids who grow up with tablets might not have much reason to learn it.

So, nobody should learn a language unless it's the "default language" for a platform? What is Python, Ruby or PHP the default language of? Should anybody be learning Perl, Haskell or Objective-C in your opinion?

I'm not saying nobody should but I bet a shitload more people go with natively supported, which might be a better term than default.

And yeah this isn't at all specific to C#. Anything not natively supported suffers - just ask Flash who in a handful of years have gone from a defacto standard to a dinosaur.

I would say the experience is what matters. The user doesn't care what technology the developer used. If you can make gorgeous, fluid and speedy native apps with Mono and C# (which is very much possible) while at the same time making it easier to do cross platform development and deployment then why not.

I recently heard creating mobile apps for iPhone and Android was possible. Forget the library though. I can ask if you're interested to know.

This article has a great title. Would have been nice if there was a bit more content to it; maybe we wouldn't have ended up with a bunch of hostile comments with spelling mistakes.

So let's give it a go. An opinionated past, present, and future for C#:

The past:

.NET emerged seemingly in 2002/2003 with a feature set similar to Java. This was pre-generics, and all code written in C# in this era is alien and involves a bit of casting.

Microsoft released Visual Studio 2002, containing support for (at least) Visual C#, VB.net, Visual C++ .NET (of course. let's blend two completely different object systems. my actual favourite: Objective-C++ .NET), real C++, and Visual J#, the successor to Visual J++ (which Sun had sued the crap out of them for). Of course you're not jealous of the JVM, Microdollar! We believe you.

C# did have structs at this point, distinct from classes, which are a pretty cool feature. They're more lightweight than classes, and I believe are passed by value rather than by reference like with classes.

Also, unsigned integer types. As a man who had to make a small machine 'emulator' in Java as part of a not incredibly well thought-out practical, I appreciate not having to bend my mind around poking the sign bit to try and get the real number I'm actually after.

And automatic unboxing and boxing of types was cool too. Int basically the same as int. So they did have a few original thoughts.

Event handling also deserves a mention, so there we go.

I personally was coding in VB6 at this time, and viewed VB.net with a mixture of bewilderment and contempt. So many keywords! Although the My.* namespace looked really cool. Actually being able to find out and change things about the current system, without being e.g. only allowed to change registry settings in a VisualBasic area of the registry.

That was about the time that I was messing around with threads thanks to the AddressOf operator, so really, a move was probably on the cards. (You had to bind the Windows threading API yourself, and when you tried to pause in the IDE it would only pause one thread, get confused, and crash.)

I eventually moved to VB.net (in the 2.0 era) and turned to treating C# with a mixture of bewilderment and disgust. (Clearly, I'm a quick learner.)

The 2.0 era

Java and .NET got generics around about the same time, a few years later. Java (sanely, to be honest) implemented generics via type erasure - so the compiler does the type checking, and then emits code that has no type information for generic containers - whereas the .NET team elected to break backwards compatibility* and make the runtime understand generics.

I think Mono appeared around this time.

This is the time when .NET started to get going, to be honest. Never settle for writing < 2.0 targetted code! Not that you can, unless you're running Visual Studio pre-2005.

XNA ran 2.0, although Microsoft's bored of trying to get people who aren't amateurs to use that now. Running my own code on the Xbox 360 was pretty cool though. But they seriously needed to put a better garbage collector on that thing. It was, er, rubbish.

* An annoying but possibly necessary decision. To this day, .NET 1.0/1.1 and 2.0+ apps require two separate runtimes to be installed, on Windows. Although Mono just deals with it, I think. Still, coming across the odd remaining 1.1 program can be a nasty surprise.

The present (kinda): 3.0/3.5

Man, why would anyone want any of this LINQ or closure stuff? I don't get it. We already have event handlers, and for blocks can do anything LINQ can do (that I'd use it for)!

It was about this time that I got into Haskell, somewhat out of necessity as that's what our uni course starts teaching. I've only grown more fond of Haskell since those days, mostly after learning a little OCaml/F# and seeing how comparatively nasty ML syntax is. Yeuch.

VB.net kinda lagged implementation-wise for these features vs. C# - I guess I wasn't the only person who moved from the former to the latter - but in C# they were fairly glorious.

No more would we be teased about the relative verbosity of our language! Fine, we still might go a bit long horizontally, but now we too can fit an amount of functionality on one line sufficient to guarantee the confusion of the reader and thus job security. Not that I have a job. Does job security keep you out of a job if you don't have one? Hm.

LINQ uses method extensions (a hilarious but occasionally useful bit of the language) to add new functions to all the collections types whenever LINQ is imported. Mapping and 'aggregating' (folding) and what have you arrived in C# 3.0, with surprisingly nippy implementations, and a whole lot more came with 3.5/4.0 (I forget).

Cool stuff. Cooler with closures. With events we didn't have to worry about writing inner Listener classes willy-nilly (insert comedy projectile vomiting here), but you still had to define the type of the function you were writing explicitly. Not so with closures. They're cool. I sometimes use them like private inner functions, but I'm pretty sure that's my fault.

Something else most definitely worth mentioning that came around here that is undoubtedly a good and cool thing was type inference, or the super magic 'var' keyword. (Like the C++ auto keyword, THAT CAME AFTERWARDS (possibly). We're inventing! Yay!)

Out with the List<string> stringList = new List<string>()! In with the var sl = new List<string>()! Glorious.

While I'm going long here, I need to also mention automatic property implementations.

So we don't have getWhatever and setWhatever functions in C# - (though we do agree with our Java brethren that generally exposed fields Are A Bad Thing) - we have: public whatever { get { return _whatever; } private set { _whatever = value; } }.

But in 3.0, you can do e.g. public whatever { get; private set; } and the boilerplate is written for you. If you ever want to swap them out with some code that actually does something at a point after that, you can then go ahead and do that. Awesome stuff. Java coders love this when they learn about it.

I think Mono also came of age here and stopped sucking. A new generational garbage collector (sgen), far greater API support, and the demands of game developers embedding the runtime left, right and center undoubtedly helped. (Mono runs on Windows and consoles, too, you know!)

Their System.Drawing implementation is still a bit crappy, though. I've had to do some weird things to alpha channels and what have you.

The future:

.NET 4.0 gave unto us the second revision of the F# language, and the Async and Await keywords. These are extremely cool, and I have had a great deal of fun writing seemingly-synchronous code (e.g. a character generation module for a MUD) that turns out to be asynchronous with the right words in the right places. Marvelous, great job, etc.

F# didn't begin existing at this point, but it basically did for me. F# is open source as heck, so it has a bit of the cool factor, and it really is just another take on OCaml. Unfortunately F# 'objects' (things, I mean) aren't real .NET objects, but you can explicitly write real .NET objects within the language with only slightly more verbose syntax and going the other way is really easy.

F# is a lot of fun and a real functional language. If you haven't tried it, you really should. Async and await are amazing here too.

Also gave us the .NET Framework 4 vs. .NET Framework 4 Client Profile as distinct framework targets. Clearly the latter is a cut-down version of the former, except that there's almost no difference in the available functionality, and the downloads for both runtimes are almost the same. Hm. Mono ignores the distinction completely, and I think we should too.

Whatever. Clearly C# is a labor of love, and we are going to get all the features we can ever pretend to understand over the coming years. I look forward to the eventual relaxing of having to put startup code in void main instead of just loose in the file (maybe), the IDE having more understanding of code (even if .NET intellisense in VS blows the C++ version out of the water and, indeed, at least three levels of atmosphere), and (optimistically) a more coherent F#.

.NET 4.0/4.5 has a bunch of features I can't even remember right now, and I look forward to learning more about the language, even if Littlecurrency politics seem to currently neglect .NET for C++ and Javascript in Metro apps a bit. (WinRT is a really cool framework though.) C'mon, only C++ apps allowed to use Direct3D? What year is this?

I'm still going to keep using C#, and I'm not the only one. (I use other languages too. Doesn't everyone? Go rules, Ruby has some very exciting ideas, and I wrote a node.js app the other day that to my surprise wasn't actually a piece of shit. So that's nice.)

I think that 'a slightly better Java than Java' is an idea that will prove promising for years to come.

A little about Mono:

Mono is a great platform, for what it's worth. With their new garbage collector (that can be tuned!), almost complete* support for the latest .NET 4.5 feature set, and their own additional features (tasklets and SIMD instructions, a REPL, and Compiler as a Service, anyone?) on top, I think it's pretty cool, and you might, too.

At the risk of preemptively lowering the tone - the current discussion here isn't that bad - the current best defense of Mono is an old Jo Shields rant at http://apebox.org/wordpress/rants/124/, though its tone is a little inflammatory at the start.

To summarize: Mono is independent from Microsoft, covered by the Open Invention Network re. patents, is a free implementation of an international standard by a convicted monopolist (a la the entire GNU system for UNIX) and is actually quite awesome in its own right. It's not just a compatibility framework. It isn't 100% compatible with the .NET Framework, and it doesn't need to be.

* Mono doesn't support WPF.

> which Sun had sewed the crap out of them for

Speaking of spelling mistakes...

Oops. I wonder if that makes me guilty of libel or slander.

I like C# and I also think that it will keep evolving. But statements like "C# has adapted to the needs of the community over these 13 years or so very well" without explaining how makes this article sound too marketing-oriented.

I would like to try it out but I'm not on Windows obviously, and I won't work to become a second class citizen ("What do you use? Mono? That's not supported").

Also, most of tooling seems to be proprietary, Windows-only too.

So I'd stick to JVM.

I'd suggest you give Mono and MonoDevelop (http://monodevelop.com/) a try! It's really good and at least most of the web stuff that I've developed have just worked out of the box on Linux (Apache + Mono).

I don't want to be a second class citizen.

I don't want to be a second class citizen ever. I don't want to be a second class citizen. I don't want to be a second class citizen ever.

"Really good" is so much different from "The Most Awesome Edition" you get with languages like Java or Ruby.

I can tinker with a "Really good" tech on home projects all right (except I prefer Clojure), but not in the workplace.

Citizen.

There is no alternative spelling. Sorry, you just used it so much!

Thanks for the correction because I always struggle with s/z in that position. It just makes so little sense! :(

There are real companies out there making real money off Mono. So it's not a toy reserved for weekend tinkering. Enough companies trust Mono to use it in production.

I'm happy for them, but I'm not going to risk it. The reward is nice but not nearly worth the risk.

When adopting Java, you can trust it will just work, but with Mono you have to bet it's going to work, you're not going to run into compatibility problems and tooling will be adequate.

Java comes with its own problems, especially in enterprise environments where you might be pinned to a single version. There are plenty of insecure JVMs out there that can't be upgraded on both servers and clients, mainly to ensure compatibility or meet support requirements.

I don't see how it is relevant WRT considering a language/platform for a new project. You're talking about legacy stuff. I don't see how this can't happen to project in any language (PHP? Ruby? Perl? C#?)

That's news to me. Not that I disbelieve. Really interested. Can you point me to some use cases? Why do they not just use Windows?

Mostly on mobile I would guess. Xamarin has a showcase on their site: http://xamarin.com/apps .

Also every game made in Unity is using Mono, which is _a lot_ of games. The Playstation Vita and Wii U uses Mono as well for third party development.

I'm sharing your opinion. JVM is an excellent choice, whether doing Java or other JVM-based language.

He clearly works for MS and probably on the team that works on C#, which is why I find it odd that he touts Mono as a feature. If MS was serious about .NET everywhere, they'd sponsor Mono/Xamarin, or offer native .NET support for OSX and Linux instead of using the Mono community's hard work to toot their own horn.

C# is a great language and has evolved beautifully, but many people will still continue to avoid it because it's owned by MS and stuck on Windows (without the help of Mono). The next Google, Facebook or Twitter won't be written with C#.

He isn't MSFT staff, read his "About the Author" page, he works for a Swedish company. Also he's a MS MVP, you can't be a Microsoft MVP and work for Microsoft at the same time.

You're right. His use of "we" had me confused.

Nothing about that article suggested he works for MS and the style of writing alone is enough to convince me he doesn't.

Does Sun/Oracle sponsor all the different implementations of Java? Does the Python Foundation sponsor the various implementations of Python?

I'm guessing the work Microsoft are currently doing with Roslyn (compiler as a service) will benefit the various implementations also.

The C# spec is open and standardised, and if a particular group wants to pick it up and implement it, I find it a very weak argument to suggest that any company should throw money behind it.

But Java and Python are cross platform out of the box.

From my limited perspective, C# hasn't changed much apart from syntactic sugar (less typing!) since generics were added in v2.0. This is similar to all the stuff Microsoft throws into their C++ compiler to make COM more user-friendly.

Most of the additions have been to the CLR, where Microsoft has earned a reputation for changing behavior in the 'green' bits (meaning: supposedly unmodified) when updates are installed. Also, Windows 8 brings the new WinRT; it's impossible to know how long either runtime will be 'the one true way' (see Silverlight).

It's hard to get behind a software development tech created by a company that makes its money selling new versions of operating systems and development tools (the cool stuff always requiring the latest versions, of course!). Microsoft is always moving the cheese.

C# is a great language and Ximian has been doing brilliant work on Mono but I'm actually starting to wonder about the long-term prospects of Microsoft. Without a significant corporate sponsor I'm just not sure it has the momentum to endure.

C# and .Net exist to support Microsoft's enterprise customers, I don't see any signs that that side of their business is struggling.

Most of the Microsofts revenue comes from server side stuff anyway, 60% from memory(?), it'll be a good 5 years at least before that market dents. I don't think you'll see c# going away anytime soon.

EDIT : couldn't find 2012 but heres 2011 http://punchcut.com/sites/punchcut.com/files/win8_1-8_eb-msf... business + server looks around 60% which I guess is where my figure comes from

I thought office was the cash cow...lot more desktops out there than (Windows) servers.

But lots of those desktops comes with cheap, sponsered OEM-licenses of Windows and Office. You don't get OEM rebates for your MS server-park.

Not the ones in corporations, they don't get oem anything. MS can, and does, extort practically whatever it wants from big business who basically are incapable of realizing alternatives to office/windows.

DO NOT mention Windows in a good way on HackerNews, its just taboo around here. (sarcasm)

I love C# as much as any MS fanboy would, but when people like Charles Petzold start abandoning C# and .NET for native C++ - http://blogs.msdn.com/b/msdnmagazine/archive/2013/01/08/1038... - to get more speed out of Windows 8 apps, then you have to start thinking maybe Microsoft is at least pushing C#/.NET out of the limelight - its not the be all and end all it used to be.

That's like saying Ruby is dying because some people choose to implement some gems in C++, which is a ridiculous thing to say. Pick the right language for the job: rapid development versus raw performance. They can coexist.

Second question down in that interview in response to petzold mentioning C++ :

Desmond: So should we be looking to move away from managed platforms and languages?

Petzold: No, no, no, not at all.

Not everything needs native C++ performance. I use C# all the time on things that need easy maintainability and to be as secure as I can reasonably make it.

Totally agreed ... horses for courses etc. I also use C# the majority of the time ... but it seems like it will now be sharing the stage with C++ and possibly HTML/JS in terms of the recommended languages by MS.

Can you please rewrite this so it doesn't look like an ad for Microsoft?

He's a junior MVP, of course it has to look like an ad :)

> C# was here to stay from the beginning, we love it in the present and we will use it more and more in the future.

This article would have received a bit more respect if it had been a bit more subtle about the C# cheerleading.

C# and .NET were designed to sell Microsoft Windows Servers, C# = Microsoft and any side project like Mono can be shut down any time. Microsoft did not become what it is by embracing open and free technologies unless it was to "extend and extinguish them", if you dont pay for a product one way or another there is no reason for Microsoft to support that product. C# is a good language but definetly not the future.

>any side project like Mono can be shut down any time.

RMS had been trying to spread that particular flavor of FUD for over a decade - albeit C#'s popularity has extended beyond Linux into mobile space.

I am no friend of Microsoft, and not a huge fan of Mono - but I think together they provide a viable alternative to the cross-platform JVM.

Microsoft has been making some decent moves into open and free as of late. The biggest thing lately, that I can think of, was their open sourcing of the entire asp.net stack:

http://aspnet.codeplex.com/

http://aspnetwebstack.codeplex.com/

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