Re: [DotGNU]C#

[Rhys Weatherley]

Daniel Carrera wrote:

> I'm sure that there are people here who can give an educated opinion on
> whether C# is a good language or not.

Every language is "good" for some particular task.  e.g.
Perl is good for scripting and glue work, but I wouldn't
want to write an operating system kernel in it (I'm sure
some nut has tried, but I wouldn't recommend it :-) ).

For the tasks that Java is good at (applet thingys and
system integration), C# has about the same level of
"goodness".  But there are plenty of things that Java
and C# are bad at (e.g. anything that is time or memory
space critical).

C# provides some features, such as properties, delegates,
value types, and attributes, that are missing from Java.
In the right circumstances and in the right hands, these
can lead to more maintainable code.  In the wrong hands:
well, you can write spaghetti code in any language.

> As for what exactly makes a good language, I hope that the experts in this
> list can tell me.  I figure that a good language makes a good attempt at
> being easy to use and learn and still provide powerful tools.

A language that is "easy to use and learn" will rarely
be a great language to program in.  COBOL is easy to
learn, but encourages disgusting programming habits,
for example.  Programming is never "easy" - a certain
mindset is required to be a programmer.  It's really
only fair to say: "easy compared to what?".

C# is marginally more difficult to learn than Java, so
if Java is your idea of "easy", then C# isn't that much
harder.  Tool support is in its infancy, but that's due
to the new nature of the language, not because of any
intrinsic problem with the language itself.

I like C#, because I believe that it is what Java could
have been if Sun wasn't quite so "clingy" with the JCP.
DotGNU is working on the tools, to bring them up to
par with other systems.

Cheers,

Rhys.