Why they keep developing Java/C#

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5936895

by redv • 13 years ago

2 12 13 years ago

news.ycombinator.com

I believe the functional languages are taking the field by storm (ocaml, f#, haskell, clojure, scala). and I wonder, why do we need languages like C#, Java for ?

alatkins• 13 years ago

Honest question: how much commercial software engineering experience do you have?

novaleaf2• 13 years ago

what alatkins is trying to say (i think), is that, depending on your skill set, different tools are easier to use for specific purposes.

That said, I would consider myself an expert C# developer, but unfortunatly needed to move to javascript (nodejs/angular) due to the limited deployment+ecosystem flexibility C# provided. A real pitty, C# and Visual Studio are best-of-breed, and very powerful.

octopus• 13 years ago

Have you tried TypeScript ? I think coming from a C# background TypeScript and his integration with VS will be a breeze.

redv3• 13 years ago

I used to develop software using C#/Java back in 2003 :) and I've been using functional languages for a few years now, and never looked back.

twblalock• 13 years ago

I don't know what field these languages are "taking by storm" -- it certainly isn't the field of corporate software development.

Java and C# have the following advantages:

- Familiarity, which means programmers are easy to hire and can finish projects without overcoming a learning curve

- A huge amount of high-quality libraries for almost any task

- Good IDEs and build tools

- The concepts are not exotic. The object-oriented features are now the industry standard.

Nobody wants to spend the time to learn these new languages if they don't offer a significant improvement over Java and C#. Of the ones you listed, Scala is the most likely to succeed because it can interoperate smoothly with Java and offers concurrency features that Java does not. Twitter's successful use of Scala has also contributed to the language's popularity.

redv3• 13 years ago

I mean software development in general. About the Advantages: -I see C#/Java copying the functional language features, which isn't supported by default which yields an ugly code, more lines to write. -No one can argue on the amount of the libraries available, but It's more JVM/CLR thing, so you can access it from anywhere -on the concepts not being exotic? well, porting functional language features doesn't really help :) -on the benefit, I believe coding in a functional language is more productive and more expressive, don't you?

joshuaellinger• 13 years ago

I kinda like to be able to write equations that, you know, look like math.

functional programming is just not well suited for that kind of work.

redv3• 13 years ago

well, then why porting its features to those languages ?

oskarkv• 13 years ago

That's your biggest concern?

ankurdhama• 13 years ago

Legacy is a bitch, specially if it is 60 years old imperative programming with object oriented makeup.

Why they keep developing Java/C#

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