4 ms·

I programmed professionally in C# for about eight years and in that time I can count on one hand the number of times I saw the ‘dynamic’ keyword. Nobody seems t

I programmed professionally in C# for about eight years and in that time I can count on one hand the number of times I saw the ‘dynamic’ keyword. Nobody seems to think it’s worth the effort or confusion.

Ididntdothis 7y ago
Agreed. It’s also not as easily used as “any” in TypeScript. I would probably reject a C# codebase that uses dynamic widely. It’s only good for very local use like some serialization or deserialization.
yyyk 7y ago
That's my experience as well, I just wanted to note that the escape hatch exists. Maybe I should have amended my comments for 99% of the time? Or perhaps that there are other functionalities (e.g. tuple types, reflection) to to make working with types almost as easy as without? I use reflection very frequently...
Fellshard 7y ago
However, in JavaScript-world, where the external types you interact with - from other libraries, from APIs, from the browser itself - are poorly defined, having that escape hatch becomes a sanity-saver, does it not? That's where the power comes from: the squishy, fuzzy, less structured edges.
- dpc_pw 7y ago
  The parent-parent comment was "I want an escape hatch in the language" and then the argument for it is "someone else used an escape hatch, and now I need an escape hatch". :D
  - RobertKerans 7y ago
    Well, yes, most of the packages available in the JS ecosystem were written in JS. The easiest way to retroactively write typings is to use `any` all over the place.
- yakshaving_jgt 7y ago
  > having that escape hatch becomes a sanity-saver, does it not? No, it does not. There is no difference between static languages and dynamic languages when parsing data at runtime.
jgalentine007 7y ago
Samesy.I almost used dynamic last week for maybe the first time ever, but ended up with a simple generic class instead.
WorldMaker 7y ago
In a past life I did some real wizardry with dynamic in C#, drastically improved performance on a thing that had been using strange combinations of T4 compile-time templates, Reflection.Emit, and some very kooky multi-database lookups with a custom IDynamicMetaObject provider. It was definitely worth the effort then. I also recognize why it is a very unlikely scenario to repeat. The other place where I used dynamic most heavily in C# was that it was really great for IronPython interop where you could have a bit of "data science" done in a Python module, build that to a .NET assembly and call into the Python module from C#. (Though the other direction was more common, using IronPython to do data science around a bulk of C# models and code.) With so much more data science since that past life of mine having moved to Python, it's almost a shame that IronPython hasn't really kept up.

Ididntdothis 7y ago

Agreed. It’s also not as easily used as “any” in TypeScript. I would probably reject a C# codebase that uses dynamic widely. It’s only good for very local use like some serialization or deserialization.

yyyk 7y ago

That's my experience as well, I just wanted to note that the escape hatch exists. Maybe I should have amended my comments for 99% of the time? Or perhaps that there are other functionalities (e.g. tuple types, reflection) to to make working with types almost as easy as without? I use reflection very frequently...

Fellshard 7y ago

However, in JavaScript-world, where the external types you interact with - from other libraries, from APIs, from the browser itself - are poorly defined, having that escape hatch becomes a sanity-saver, does it not? That's where the power comes from: the squishy, fuzzy, less structured edges.

dpc_pw 7y ago
The parent-parent comment was "I want an escape hatch in the language" and then the argument for it is "someone else used an escape hatch, and now I need an escape hatch". :D
- RobertKerans 7y ago
  Well, yes, most of the packages available in the JS ecosystem were written in JS. The easiest way to retroactively write typings is to use `any` all over the place.
yakshaving_jgt 7y ago
> having that escape hatch becomes a sanity-saver, does it not? No, it does not. There is no difference between static languages and dynamic languages when parsing data at runtime.

jgalentine007 7y ago

Samesy.I almost used dynamic last week for maybe the first time ever, but ended up with a simple generic class instead.

WorldMaker 7y ago

In a past life I did some real wizardry with dynamic in C#, drastically improved performance on a thing that had been using strange combinations of T4 compile-time templates, Reflection.Emit, and some very kooky multi-database lookups with a custom IDynamicMetaObject provider. It was definitely worth the effort then. I also recognize why it is a very unlikely scenario to repeat. The other place where I used dynamic most heavily in C# was that it was really great for IronPython interop where you could have a bit of "data science" done in a Python module, build that to a .NET assembly and call into the Python module from C#. (Though the other direction was more common, using IronPython to do data science around a bulk of C# models and code.) With so much more data science since that past life of mine having moved to Python, it's almost a shame that IronPython hasn't really kept up.