does the language allow something like the following?: yes, exactly. The problem is you see stuff like this: var obj = new SomeType(); obj = GetSomeType(

does the language allow something like the following?: yes, exactly. The problem is you see stuff like this: var obj = new SomeType(); obj = GetSomeType(); Basically creating 2 objects, the first of which is immediately garbage since it no longer has any roots. Anyone who understands pointers/references and memory allocation should understand that "new" is actually creating a new live object on the heap, rather than just initializing a pointer to null (or a stack-based value type to zero). These days C# is actually a decent language to code in, it has a nice functional aspect to it with linq/lambdas, and you can still go down to C style pointers/"unsafe" code if necessary (with lots of restrictions of course). It's really the Microsoft dependency that kills it more than anything else.