C# 7 Work List of Features

https://github.com/dotnet/roslyn/issues/2136

by rajeemcariazo • 11 years ago

246 138 11 years ago

orf• 11 years ago

Improved tuple support would be awesome, it's something I often miss when working with C# and coming from a Python background (that along with a nicer dictionary syntax). The nullability tracking proposal also looks interesting.

Overall looks like C# 7 is going to be awesome even if only a few of these get implemented.

thecopy• 11 years ago

Agreed! I really like the idea of symmetry when calling a method. I have never gotten why we can send multiple values in, but only one value out. And polluting the source code with structs for every method which needs to return two or more values is ugly.

cltsang• 11 years ago

Well, that's what out and ref parameters are for

NKCSS• 11 years ago

There have been Generic Tuples for a while in .NET... https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/system.tuple%28v=vs...

cies5• 11 years ago

Wow.. This "Strong interest list" is awesome:

* Tuples (Proposal: #347)

* Pattern matching (Proposal: #206)

* Records / algebraic data types (Proposal: #206)

* Nullability tracking (Proposal: #227)

* Async streams and disposal (Proposals: #114, #261)

They seem to be really useful for a "more-functional style" of programming.

When comparing these ambitions and the level of transparency to Java's ambitions & transparency, then it seems that C# is (or has) overtaking Java. Combine that to the fact that dotnet is now an opensource project, and MS seems to be more "open" nowadays then Oracle has ever been: I'm stoked about this news.

MichaelGG10• 11 years ago

It's "awesome" ... yet still many years on behind. These are the kinds of things that should have been in v1 or v2. Things that F# got right from the get-go.

It's great if you have to work on projects that are stuck with C# (but can freely use the latest compiler).

cies5• 11 years ago

Given how much MS has invested in Haskell, and how little/late they use that technology to their advantage has made me wonder many times what drives their R&D budget.

Non the less: cool "new" features in C#, and thank you very much MS for investing so generously in Haskell!

M83• 11 years ago

Don't forget that F# was mostly "forked" from OCAML, while C# was mostly "forked" from Java. So yes, F# got some OCAML features, but it got the weird ML syntax as well.

bernadus_edwin3• 11 years ago

It is kinda little irony. C# become more like sun in 90s and java become more like microsoft in 90s

cies5• 11 years ago

Yups. That's exactly what I was driving at with my comment.

manojlds• 11 years ago

C# the language has been ahead of Java the language for years now.

saiya-jin• 11 years ago

Java's strength is not the power of the language, and nobody ever claimed so. They improve it bit by bit, but that's all. You want to use uber-cool features? Try Scala or any of the gazillions other languages/platforms JVM fully supports.

(personal anecdote - as senior java guy with 10+ years of experience, I've got recently assigned a small project of amending legacy MFC C++ (but mostly C) app - I could write a book about the pain. Language itself is a minor obstacle in this effort (albeit MFC/WinAPI has very steep learning curve for me).

Where Java wins, and will win for many years to come is maturity of toolset, quality of open source libraries and also probably the most important thing - the amount of skilled developers any employer can pick from.

.NET platform will probably get (finally) on track, but it's an uphill battle against Oracle's current position. But I like the situation - improvement in MS camp will force competition to improve as well, so we all benefit :)

WDCDev2• 11 years ago

I always felt Java's strength was the runtime. Java can run on so many platforms. Compare that to how many CLR implementations there are. This is one of .NET's biggest failings, though this is being rectified by MS when the open sourced the runtime.

melling• 11 years ago

Scala compiles too slowly. Otherwise, it would be more popular. In general, I think it's a bad idea to make these sort of excuses. Java as a language needs to better compete. The Perl community, for example, used to diss Python by saying CPAN gave it a huge advantage. Perl lost momentum and all the kids now use Python. C# can be used with Unity, for instance. Gateway drug. :-).

yatendra• 11 years ago

Well MFC C++(mostly C) and .Net are as similar as C++ and Java. MFC C++(mostly C) is unmanaged legacy code and .Net is managed code.

awa• 11 years ago

Interesting that you rate Java higher in maturity of toolset given that C# has Visual studio + Resharper which many believe to be the best IDE experience out there for OO development.

nbevans• 11 years ago

".NET platform will probably get (finally) on track"

Eh? .NET land has been on a higher technical superiority level to Java for almost a decade. Pretty much as soon as .NET got generics at the CLR level the tide was changing. Then that so-called LINQ feature in C# put the final nail in the Java coffin. The fact that .NET has always had value types and function/delegate types from day one has meant the third party .NET toolset has emerged in a different less clumsy way than in Java land.

"but it's an uphill battle against Oracle's current position"

Eh? Java isn't even open source in any meaningful sense. Just look what happened to Google/Android when they mistakenly thought Java was open source.

I'm not sure what this so called "maturity of toolset" for Java really is either. Most of it is just piles of garbage libraries and frameworks to work around fundamental flaws of the language, and/or to continue pedalling the broken enterprise styles of OOP and SOLID bandwagon onto yet more innocents.

"the amount of skilled developers any employer can pick from."

Eh? Ever tried picking a good one from a batch of Java Enterprise devs? It can be a costly exercise. There is almost nothing to distinguish them, that is the problem. Because they're all just Gang Of Four Do-Repeat-Yourself-But-Claim-Not-To code monkeys.

thescrewdriver3• 11 years ago

That's a very useful set of features, glad to see more of the features I'm used to in Scala (although obviously not the first to have those features) showing up in C#.

It's still a bit of a stretch to say that C# has "overtaken" Java in general, or to read too much into Microsoft's moves (they haven't open sourced any of their main profit-generating software (SQLServer, Windows etc.), just enough to earn a bit of street cred. amongst developers).

In terms of features C# is far ahead of Java, but many Java developers simply don't care as C# is far from being widely established and broadly used outside of Windows. Even on the JVM many Java developers will use Java the language as it's the standard, rather than because it is a fantastic language. Those who do care have moved on to Scala, Clojure etc. We've relegated Java (the language) largely to legacy status, but rely heavily on the Java ecosystem (JVM, IntellJ, java libs etc.).

blumkvist• 11 years ago

Middleware is the most important strength of Java.

halosghost2• 11 years ago

I am incredibly psyched for Tuples, Pattern matching, Algebraic data types and Nullability Tracking (four of the most-likely list)!

I mean, to be fair, these are all things that Haskell offers me, but more languages getting these can't hurt! Good steps forward! Now, all I have to hope for is that the nix support for .NET becomes more robust so I can actually code in C# on platforms that I care about supporting ^_^ (Note: this is not meant as a slight towards Windows, I just prefer working with / coding for nix).

platz2• 11 years ago

Regarding Pattern Matching and Algebraic data types, I am not sure that they are implementing both of these ideas to the fullest extent that you would find when we typically refer to these items in existing functional languages.

For example, Pattern Matching. From my glance it appears a nice way to assign bindings from an expression, but I didn't see anything about guards. Also, any kind of pattern matching without the ability to check for exhaustiveness defeats the safety they provide usually comparable with inheritance.

Which comes to Algebraic data types. All I know is there are several boxes you must tick to really call it "Algebraic data types". I am not sure all those boxes are "ticked" here. This question came up when swift introduced "Algebraic data types", but no-one could get recursive ADT's to compile. it does look like this proposal allows recursion, but there are other things i'm sure are at play such as how it works with generics.

reactor5• 11 years ago

I've been using Java for almost 6 years mainly with IntelliJ and I've heard many times that C# is better than Java. Recently I've got chance to work with C# (on Visual Studio 2012 with Resharper). Oh boy, I don't know how to express my feeling, but in one sentence "It's just suck to the core".

I completely agree, as a language C# is more rounded, but as far as the ecosystem and tooling concerned its literally nowhere near to Java.

rjbwork• 11 years ago

That's funny to me because my experience was the exact opposite. After an undergrad experience of Java, C, C++, Python (at least from the OO/C-likes) on *nix systems, trying C# 5 w/ VS2010 + ReSharper was some kind of transcendent experience.

I LOVE the language and I've found the entire ecosystem fine. There are some corner cases for some more advanced systems level stuff, but I've yet to be unable to do something I needed to.

Java feels like a clunky dinosaur to me now. But hey, different strokes for different folks.

manzanapera• 11 years ago

I'm disappointed by your comment because you didn't provide any details on how "It just suck to the core". Guess you only wanted to trash-talk C#?

kirse2• 11 years ago

It's interesting that you view things that way, because my opinion is basically flipped. Eclipse is an absolute displeasure to work with (the default IDE for most Java programmers), and don't even get me started on AbstractFactoryFactories and Beans, insane unreadable stack traces, the 1970s look of Swing GUI, JAR hell (classpath issues), Maven not working in offline mode, Applets and their manifest files and signing issues, etc.

Maybe I've just worked with too much enterprise-y Java code which always tends to be a cluster. Anytime the acronyms "SOA" or "ESB" enter the mix I start fearing for my sanity. But even Android programming seems to have more quirks than WinPhone development, although I'm comparing my experience w/ ICS 4.0 to WP 8.1 here.

What annoyed you about C#? I'm curious where you think the ecosystem or tooling is better than C#.

guiomie2• 11 years ago

Just like all other comments ... total opposite for me. I love visual studio. I did some android development few months ago, I tried eclipse and Intellij and I missed VS2012 badly.

nullgeo• 11 years ago

"It's just suck to the core"

You are not helping anyone out here. Why does C# suck for you?

I find the tooling for C# projects using VS as a very nice feature set. Look at what VS supports today. Grunt, npm and bower are supported by VS out of the box. Also, nuget package manager has saved me many DLL hell problems that could have occurred without it. VS also supports many third-party extensions and tooling, which is what makes me thinks it is one of the best IDEs out there.

suresk• 11 years ago

I've been doing Java development for over a decade and have dabbled in the C#/.NET ecosystem a handful of times. My knee-jerk reaction is always sort of similar (and I write posts about stuff I miss [1] about what I miss), but I don't actually think it sucks at all - it is mostly just about getting used to a new environment.

I'd fully expect someone coming from a .NET ecosystem to have a similar reaction, and the truth lies somewhere in the middle: both of them have their things they excel at and things they are less good at, but a lot of it comes down to what you are used to.

Even though my gut reaction is sometimes similar to yours, I'd jump at the chance to do C# full-time, because I think there is some really nice stuff in the language and the platform seems really interesting once you get past the parts that feel unfamiliar.

[1] http://www.spenceruresk.com/2011/01/visual-studio-2010-a-bun...

PopsiclePete3• 11 years ago

Java the language may suck, but the JVM rules. Microsoft's idiotic stance to make C# and the CLR windows only for the last 15 years basically made it largely irrelevant outside of pur MS shops. I program C# for a day job and it doesn't matter how awesome the language is, because the entire eco-system until recently was hampered by being MS-only.

We are slooooooooooooooooooowly seeing the ship turn around with NuGet, and many MS-build libs appearing on Github and the CLR and compiler going cross-platform but it's 15 years too fucking late to matter.

Java and the JVM won.

nightski2• 11 years ago

Haha, no. In fact there is plenty of room for both. On the bright side you can go to just about any city in the country and find a job in either Java or C#/.NET development. Both are very widely used.

mhomde3• 11 years ago

I don't know, dont' get me wrong these are all nice features but it's nothing that I think will drastically change or improve the way I code (like for instance LINQ or generics did). With the possible exception of null tracking (no pun intended). Making testing and eliminating bugs easier is the one area that really could benefit from a grand new concept or methodology.

I was really hoping for better integration of tests and pre/post conditions

pistle3• 11 years ago

There are only so many LINQ's in the history of programming or any programming language. It is unlikely that anything added to the language, at this point, would have such an impact.

On testing and pre/post, this is an area around which I am quite sympathetic. However, I'm ambivalent about the unintended consequences of fleshing it out too far. It seems that by encouraging testable code, I get much of the relief to my pain. That said, it's a cat and mouse game for things like async-await features... followed by support for testing said language feature.

the8472• 11 years ago

the level of transparency to Java's ambitions

They are fairly transparent if you ask me. Here are a few examples[1][2], there are more to be found on the openjdk page

Additionally, scala already has some of the features proposed for the inclusion in C# in the future.

[1] http://openjdk.java.net/jeps/0

[2] http://openjdk.java.net/projects/panama/

saosebastiao• 11 years ago

This is pretty amazing...its almost as if the Roslyn devs are all fans of F#. Even though I'll probably still end up using F# the majority of the time, better interop with C# sounds like a really good deal.

MichaelGG10• 11 years ago

Or they're just converging on decent designs over time. Just like fixing their lack of optional parameters (although the implementation is still a broken compile-into-callsite C-style method). Just like adding more support for mutability. Null references were a mistake, and now, after countless thousands of lost hours due to them, they're starting to patch it up. But it's probably heavily inspired by people on the same platform getting radically better feature support by a much smaller team.

Or as Don Syme said (I think it was him or perhaps SPJ), features get done in Haskell, trickle into F#, then into C#. Even generics was in F# before C#.

And the current proposal on records does not appear to be compatible with F#. I'd give a somewhat higher probability to the F# compiler changing to deal with C# than vice versa.

emmanueloga_• 11 years ago

I think people mentioned this already, but the first four bullet points make it look like there's a strong interest in getting C# closer to ML :-). Nice!

octo_t• 11 years ago

The fact that this is so out in the open on Github is pretty amazing - shows how much Microsoft is changing.

Can you imagine the feature list of C# 1.0 being discussed like this?

cies5• 11 years ago

Yups. They day I read their massive open source release announcements I knew that MS is from now on not the same company it was.

Mahatma Gandhi supposedly said: "First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win." Which I think is very applicable to MS attitude to open source.

Now they have a new attitude: If you can't beat'm, join'm.

LLWM• 11 years ago

First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then they embrace you, then they extend you, then they extinguish you.

danbruc• 11 years ago

But this is not as new as some may think. The Entity Framework team uses a transparent design process [1] since 2008 and the C# team also opened the design process to the public some time ago. But it is of course getting more wide spread and even more open.

[1] http://blogs.msdn.com/b/efdesign/archive/2008/06/23/transpar...

sker• 11 years ago

Man these guys don't stop. They haven't even released C# 6 and now we're discussing 7.

With the "strong interest" features and type providers, is there any reason left to use F#?

Also, I don't see why array slicing would require CLR support. That would be a welcome addition.

bernadus_edwin3• 11 years ago

Dot net framework team are very fast.

When i want move to RoR, they provide asp mvc 3 include EF migration.

When i want move to js, they provide async keyword.

Now when i want move to f#, they provide it all in c# language

M83• 11 years ago

I would only use F# if I already knew it. Otherwise it just doesn't give any killer features anymore to justify the effort needed to learn it. I don't consider things like no nulls and default immutability a killer feature. Also there is just a handful of F# jobs and they don't offer an outstanding salary for knowing F#.

kirse2• 11 years ago

F# async and parallel programming (Async.parallel, Agents/Mailboxes, Array.parallel.map, etc) are vastly superior to C# right now. Every latest C# iteration has repeatedly borrowed everything great from F#, that should be a sign alone that F# has tons of killer features (and continues to be ahead of the curve).

I picked up F# in about 3 months by reading a few books, then refactoring a C# library into F# (this taught me a lot of the interop quirks), and then doing a full project in as much of the F# idiomatic way as possible.

As far as jobs, I don't know anyone who uses the .NET stack that considers themselves strictly an "X" programmer. I've never used VB on a project, but I'd be pretty confident I could consult on a large VB project based on how much C# I've written. Mixed projects are really the best of both worlds anyway, learning F# will improve your C# simply because it teaches you new ways of reasoning about your domain.

If C# 7 ends up implementing Tuples, pattern matching, ADTs, etc... those are all bread-and-butter of F#, might as well learn how to use them ahead of time.

kvb• 11 years ago

I think there are several reasons to prefer F#. First of all, you can use all of these features in F# today, but when's C# 7 going to be available, and will the "strong interest" features (not to mention type providers) all make it?

But more fundamentally, adding features like these to C# is awesome, but there's no way to remove now-obsolete patterns without breaking legacy code, so it's still possible to shoot yourself in the foot in many ways that you can't in F#.

Some other authors have also addressed this question recently: [1], [2].

[1] http://fsharpforfunandprofit.com/posts/is-your-language-unre... [2] http://blog.ploeh.dk/2015/04/15/c-will-eventually-get-all-f-...

cwyers2• 11 years ago

C# 6 isn't even out yet, and it's not like F# is mandated to stand still and add nothing.

MichaelGG10• 11 years ago

No but C# gets a lot more budget and marketing. For a long time F# was pitched as an oddity for science and finance people. Instead of being pitched as "essentially better in every aspect except tooling".

MichaelGG10• 11 years ago

F# is still less verbose and does far better type inference. I wrote teh same program in C# and F# (a few hundred lines of C#) and it F# had only 1/20th of the number of type annotations required.

Also C#'s statement-oriented nature just makes things ugly. Stuff like:

  Bar x;
  if (...) {
    var a = frob();
    x = Foo + a
  } else {
    x = Baz
  }

That's much nicer as a sub-block expression. It also allows you to scope things better. F# allows you to shadow variables, which comes in handy a: to avoid using an "old" variable, b: with nested lambdas.

F#'s Active Patterns are pretty damn nifty. F#'s also has deeper support for immutability. Even simple stuff like optional parameters C# gets wrong.

Overall, it's like using vim. There's some big things (like macros) that really help, but a ton of small things really do add up. I find it enjoyable to write in F#, I can be concise and write what I'm thinking. In C# I've got all this extra boilerplate that doesn't benefit me.

There's no doubt that C# can try to close the gap and certainly provide huge improvements from where they are today. But their overall approach seems to get the biggest "bang for buck" while confusing as few of their users as possible. And elegance/consistency be damned[1]. It's not a bad choice for certain projects (I dunno, maybe writing an ERP where you're adding all sorts of boring rules and need to be able to throw interns and get a known-quantity of quality) but it's hardly terrific if you've got control over your developers.

1: Look at C#'s duck typing, or type inference, or lambda expression support - they were forced in for the LINQ use case and nothing more.

Someone1234• 11 years ago

Also C#'s statement-oriented nature just makes things ugly. Stuff like: [code]

I am not following what is bad about the example. Could you reproduce that same code in F# or whatever you're saying is better. It might help explain what you're getting at.

guiomie2• 11 years ago

Not sure to get the Tuple (#347) ... Why not use an anonymous type or the already existing Tuple class ?

louthy2• 11 years ago

Anonymous types can't be returned from a method. Well, they can, but not with any kind of safety (casting to object, or dynamic). Using tuples is all about representing a type by its 'shape', not its name. With anonymous types there's no shape declaration; but I could imagine that it would be useful for C# to allow implicit casting of anonymouse types to tuples (where the shapes are equal).

jtreminio• 11 years ago

If I wanted to learn C#, not knowing any other compiled languages (but knowing PHP), where would I start? Another gotcha: I'm on OSX, and would prefer to learn C# from the standpoint of CLI first, then GUI components.

WDCDev2• 11 years ago

You have a couple options:

1) Code up some simple C# code in a text editor (sublime) and then compile it using the mono c# compiler.

2) Run Windows on Parallels and download visual studio community edition.

Folks are working on a CLR that will run on Darwin and the core framework as well as an alternative to Mono. This won't be released until later this year though, and tooling is still TBD.

josteink• 11 years ago

Sublime? Parralells?

Why not just Monodevelop[1] instead? It's an open-source .NET IDE. Although not on par with Visual Studio, I doubt anyone would expect that anytime soon.

For a beginner it will probably be very relieving having Intellisense and code-completion, not to mention it will encourage exploration of the APIs in a much more playful manner than trying to read MSDN docs.

If you're going to start getting into C#, don't start with your hands tied behind your back. Get the full package!

[1] http://www.monodevelop.com/

Zolomon• 11 years ago

Use mono [1]! Then write your first console application [2]. Or read [3] to learn about the language. And then maybe check out some trending github projects [4]!

[1] http://www.mono-project.com/

[2] https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/k1sx6ed2.aspx

[3] http://learnxinyminutes.com/docs/csharp/

[4] https://github.com/trending?l=csharp

robodale• 11 years ago

Start with Mono. The .NET platform is a beast to "just sit down and learn". I've been doing .NET since 2002.

drewmate• 11 years ago

I would highly recommend this book: http://www.amazon.com/5-0-Nutshell-The-Definitive-Reference/... . The authors really know their C#. I have the pocket edition of this book and have looked at the full version, and it looks like a much more in-depth version that would be useful for someone just starting out.

I have no experience with C# on a mac, but I know it is possible. See: http://www.mono-project.com/docs/about-mono/supported-platfo.... You'd probably have pretty good support for anything on the CLI, but might run in to issues if/when you make the jum pto GUIs. Good luck!

286c8cb04bda• 11 years ago

I recommend this book: http://www.amazon.com/-/dp/0321877586

It focuses on the language, not any specific implementation. The examples all use the command-line compiler, not Visual Studio. So you would be able to use the Mono Development Kit.

jackhack• 11 years ago

I do all my development on my Macbook, inside a Parallels Desktop virtual machine running one of several builds of Windows (XP, 7, 8, 10).

You have two problems to tackle, as I see it: 1) building and environment 2) learning the language

1. Download Sun VirtualBox (free). Set up a virtual machine with your favorite build of windows (windows 10 preview is free) @http://windows.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/preview-iso

Install Visual Studio Community edition. You could learn C# from the command line, but this gives you a great IDE and debugger: https://www.visualstudio.com/products/visual-studio-communit... In the early days of learning c#, you'll value that debugger.

2. Language. Learning the language in isolation isn't very useful -- it's the dotnet libraries which give the real power of course. Everyone will have their own favourites for texts, but the one I used for myself and my teams over the years is "Learning c#" by Jesse Liberty. The first version, c#1.0. (IMO, the later books which were co-authored were not up to the standards of the first one; they tend to muddle and wander. Most of what you learn will apply, and once you feel like you've got your sea legs, you can grab a tutorial for an up-to-date version (c#6) and learn about the changes.) http://www.amazon.com/Programming-Building-Applications-Jess...

Best of luck to you!

rcurry• 11 years ago

I think one of the best places to start with C#, if you have prior programming experience, is Jeffrey Richter's book "CLR via C#". I think it's a great book because it teaches you the specifics of the CLR as you are learning the language. You'll come away from it with a much deeper understanding of the C#/CLR system than you'd get from starting with a regular tutorial; C# is a lot like Java in that learning the language is only half the battle, you also need to understand the virtual machine.

Glide• 11 years ago

I wrote a similar answer on stack overflow a while ago. I would recommend Parallels to run windows and Visual Studio if you can. The community edition is free and is basically the pro version of it.

The main reason why you want to use VS is because if you just want to learn the language most of the resources out there assume you're coming from Visual Studio/Windows. There's enough crap to worry about without trying to figure out issues with your IDE/compiler/etc.

TazeTSchnitzel• 11 years ago

The one thing that worries me about the tuples proposal is it would be confused with System.Tuple. The proposal seems similar to Python's namedtuple, so if possible, perhaps they could add some new .NET type (System.NamedTuple?) and use that?

ExpiredLink• 11 years ago

More features == better language. A tried and proven strategy.

aeonsky2• 11 years ago

Are you willing to say the same for C++?

pjmlp2• 11 years ago

Yes.

Most of the C++ warts are caused by the need to be copy-paste compatible with C, expectations of C developers being lured into this new language and be a drop-in compatible replacement for C tooling.

"The Design and Evolution of C++", http://www.amazon.com/The-Design-Evolution-Bjarne-Stroustrup...

thescrewdriver3• 11 years ago

It's worked really well for C# so far, so perhaps it's only one of meany factors which determine the success of a language.

pointernil2• 11 years ago

Nice.

At what point would it make more sense to just leave c# as it is and move on to a new "language"?

I like all the changes and more importantly I guess I actually understand the intention and the need for them, at same time I'd like to question how all those actually fit into one language...

I understand MS has a very strong record for support of legacy software, systems etc. So for sure on point would be to still "support" legacy C# code and allow for more modern paradimes in the same language, but given all the other .net languages and the interoperability provided: what is the drive behind pulling it all in into C#?

MichaelGG10• 11 years ago

They're far too heavily invested in C#, and good alternatives, like F#, are viewed as too difficult for the majority of their customer base to deal with.

They can add these features, let less ... able ... customers argue over "var" and what they'll use, while pleasing other users. C#'s seriously annoying to code in due to it's statement-oriented nature and lack of basic features.

Additionally, because libraries take dependencies on C# compiler implementation details, other languages do not interop as seamlessly as the .NET/CLR concept would have us believe. Looking at things like the precise output of lambda expressions, or all these APIs that take object, then read the properties as an argument list (which should just take a list of tuples instead).

Also, just imagine the fallout of "Microsoft abandons main .NET language!"

mattmanser3• 11 years ago

Seriously annoying? If you don't like it, don't use it and comment on other things. There's plenty of people that think it's one of the best languages available today.

pointernil2• 11 years ago

I think your statements are a little too general, even though you might have a point here:

What does it tell about the the real life "interoperability" on the .net platform, when every language needs all the features? My guess would be: the technical "possibility" is there yet the eco-system as a whole of day to day developers, technical managers, project life-cycles and real life products with some legacy heavily bends towards single application development language even though developers mostly already use several other languages like for scripting or sql, html, css, javascript etc.

sremani• 11 years ago

C# is dove-tailing lot of F# improvements/accomplishments. So if you want to use these features today and not wait till C# 7.0, its already time to code in F#.

rattray• 11 years ago

These are pretty small changes on the whole, no? Adding tuples? A new datatype here and there? That's pretty standard for what's put into new language versions. And the work to port to a completely new language is quite hard; the work to update a codebase to these changes seems tiny in comparison to even rewriting in F# or Java, let alone something radically different (say, a lisp).

Too• 11 years ago

Branding and recognition. Microsoft wants to be able to say C# is the top 5 most used programming language. Not that they have 10 different languages in the top 100 used ones. C# is the flag ship and there shouldn't be any question whatsoever which language you should use if you run the MS stack (unless you have very strong desires for something special, like F#). Splitting the language into a new one would just segregate the community and you risk ending up with the python 2vs3 mess.

Also consider working in enterprise and asking your manager if it's ok to "change language" from C# to MSNEW#, vs doing a "minor update" from c# 6.0 to 7.0. Even if MSNEW# was backwards compatible and C# 7.0 wasn't, i imagine the answer on the second question to much more likely get an ok.

luddypants• 11 years ago

This has no been the case historically, I'm not sure why it would be now. Why would ms invest in languages like vb.net and f# if so? Choice of languages that target the CLR has always been a selling point even though c# is dominant.

DonnyV• 11 years ago

The great thing about .NET is that it has a ton of great features but never feels overwhelming or slow.

C# 7 Work List of Features

Related Stories