3 ms·

I agree with everything you said, except for this part: > There’s this weird misconception in Microsoft land that if you choose .NET you must also use all MS’s

by devjab 3y ago

I agree with everything you said, except for this part: > There’s this weird misconception in Microsoft land that if you choose .NET you must also use all MS’s half-assed libraries. The way I see it, it's more the opposite really. People chose .NET (or more specifically C#), because, they want to use it's tooling and if you're not going to use it, then why would you pick C#? .NET on it's own is excellent, I'm not sure if I think it's as good as the JVM, but it's definitely gotten very good in the recent years, but why would you pick it if you didn't plan on using the "official" tooling? I'm sure there are some good answers to that question. We just haven't found any.

skrebbel 3y ago
> why would you pick C#? Because it’s a great language with amazing tooling. It’s fast, robust, easy to debug, easy to refactor, and so on. It’s also very easy to learn for novices and experienced programmers alike because it’s kind of the middle ground between many popular programming paradigms, and it has few surprising gotchas. It’s a fast way to get a heterogeneous team productive.
- devjab 3y ago
  > Because it’s a great language with amazing tooling. It’s fast, robust, easy to debug, easy to refactor, and so on. I agree but I also think the main issue with this is that you could've said it in reference to most programming languages in 2023. I'm sure people can have a lot of debate on that, but aside from the fast bit, most programming languages are frankly in excellent places today, and fast is sort of irrelevant for us specifically as we tend to use c/c++ for that.
  - skrebbel 3y ago
    I see your point and I agree. At the same time, our current backend is Elixir because the BEAM is a fantastic match to our product. It’s been the right choice but I miss C# every day. Never having typos, point and click debugging, renaming stuff in a second instead of 15 minutes of careful grepping, etc. I recognize eg the JVM has all this too but plenty other popular languages do not.
  - sshine 3y ago
    I was helping some friends with F# homework, and being a Rust programmer, I had to ask: your project file is XML, and the order you list the project files matter, and it won’t tell you that you listed them wrong? Compile errors are super long lines and don’t show an excerpt of the code with underline under what went wrong with suggestions on how to fix it? I know I’m asking a lot here, but that level is available with Rust and Elm.
    - throwaway2990 3y ago
      > and the order you list the project files matter What do you mean by this?
      - Paradigma11 3y ago
        The FSharp compiler reads the source code in a sequential linear way and throws an error if you reference something defined later. This also includes separate files, which is why the order matters. If file A is read earlier you cant reference in it anything from file B which will be read later.
    - Paradigma11 3y ago
      You do have some tooling support for ordering files in VS and VSCode using Ionide. It is also not always the case that there is a right way to order the files and checking all permutations would get expensive fast. Basically, in F# that is part of the design process and helps you a lot later since you can just read the code in a linear way the same way the compiler does and not miss anything. You do get the same information in the IDE from intellisense.
      - sshine 3y ago
        I’m not impressed by this design choice. When order of declaration matters, it ceases to be declarative. “Let there be a function” is instead “make me a function”. It’s entirely unnecessary, and even JavaScript can let you run a function that gets declared later. The advantage when order does not matter inside the module is that you can list big things at the top of the file and the smaller things it’s made of below, rather than opposite. The advantage when order does not matter outside the module system is that you can have mutually recursive modules.

by devjab 3y ago

skrebbel 3y ago

> why would you pick C#? Because it’s a great language with amazing tooling. It’s fast, robust, easy to debug, easy to refactor, and so on. It’s also very easy to learn for novices and experienced programmers alike because it’s kind of the middle ground between many popular programming paradigms, and it has few surprising gotchas. It’s a fast way to get a heterogeneous team productive.

devjab 3y ago
> Because it’s a great language with amazing tooling. It’s fast, robust, easy to debug, easy to refactor, and so on. I agree but I also think the main issue with this is that you could've said it in reference to most programming languages in 2023. I'm sure people can have a lot of debate on that, but aside from the fast bit, most programming languages are frankly in excellent places today, and fast is sort of irrelevant for us specifically as we tend to use c/c++ for that.
- skrebbel 3y ago
  I see your point and I agree. At the same time, our current backend is Elixir because the BEAM is a fantastic match to our product. It’s been the right choice but I miss C# every day. Never having typos, point and click debugging, renaming stuff in a second instead of 15 minutes of careful grepping, etc. I recognize eg the JVM has all this too but plenty other popular languages do not.
- sshine 3y ago
  I was helping some friends with F# homework, and being a Rust programmer, I had to ask: your project file is XML, and the order you list the project files matter, and it won’t tell you that you listed them wrong? Compile errors are super long lines and don’t show an excerpt of the code with underline under what went wrong with suggestions on how to fix it? I know I’m asking a lot here, but that level is available with Rust and Elm.
  - throwaway2990 3y ago
    > and the order you list the project files matter What do you mean by this?
    - Paradigma11 3y ago
      The FSharp compiler reads the source code in a sequential linear way and throws an error if you reference something defined later. This also includes separate files, which is why the order matters. If file A is read earlier you cant reference in it anything from file B which will be read later.
  - Paradigma11 3y ago
    You do have some tooling support for ordering files in VS and VSCode using Ionide. It is also not always the case that there is a right way to order the files and checking all permutations would get expensive fast. Basically, in F# that is part of the design process and helps you a lot later since you can just read the code in a linear way the same way the compiler does and not miss anything. You do get the same information in the IDE from intellisense.
    - sshine 3y ago
      I’m not impressed by this design choice. When order of declaration matters, it ceases to be declarative. “Let there be a function” is instead “make me a function”. It’s entirely unnecessary, and even JavaScript can let you run a function that gets declared later. The advantage when order does not matter inside the module is that you can list big things at the top of the file and the smaller things it’s made of below, rather than opposite. The advantage when order does not matter outside the module system is that you can have mutually recursive modules.