4 ms·

C# is solid. It’s not necessarily the best at anything (is it?), but its floor is like a 3 out of 4 across the board. I remember making a big spreadsheet of la

C# is solid. It’s not necessarily the best at anything (is it?), but its floor is like a 3 out of 4 across the board. I remember making a big spreadsheet of languages and a bunch of potential areas of use. Building desktop apps, mobile apps, games, concurrency, performance, cloud native, web apps, data pipelines, and machine learning. C# is 3 out of 4 on all of those, except maybe 4/4 on games with Unity, and being cloud native with Azure, C# gives you a bunch of stuff automatically especially around observability.

Atotalnoob 2y ago
C# has changed a ton in the last few years, it’s definitely 4/4 for me…
- CharlieDigital 2y ago
  It's getting closer and closer to TypeScript.
  - yodon 2y ago
    You presumably are aware that C# and TypeScript share the same original language designer
    - CharlieDigital 2y ago
      Yes; GOAT. What's interesting is whereas a very large community has embraced TS, C# feels like it hasn't gotten as much love despite being so similar at a language construct level (async, exceptions, generics, etc.)
  - Atotalnoob 2y ago
    They were made by the same dude, so it makes sense they are similar.
  - pier25 2y ago
    Probably the other way around...
    - CharlieDigital 2y ago
      It's bi-directional. In recent years, C# has gained destructuring, collection initializers, tuples, and a few other niceties. JS/TS are missing expression matching that C# gained, but there's a proposal for it for JS. C# is missing discriminated unions, but there's a proposal in process for it.
caspper69 2y ago
I am a huge C# advocate, and with the AOT stuff since .NET 7, they are really working overtime to add features for safe low-level operations. Some of the niceties over the last several versions include immutable record types, stack allocated structs (ref structs), lambdas (and a host of enhancements thereof since), async/await (of course), generic math ops, platform intrinsics, pattern matching, AOT, nullable types, robust generics, reflection, dynamic types, etc. The big thing I expect next is algebraic data types. The language has really grown by leaps and bounds, but it doesn't ever feel overwhelming, and it has really kept its verbosity to a minimum without turning into a soup of hieroglyphics. That being said, I have found the Android/iOS solutions to be underwhelming. I understand the iOS side a bit, but I thought Android would be better. That's not to say you can't make great applications using C# on these platforms, just that it requires more effort. I'm also not a huge fan of ASP.Net. I've never really cared for it, and I think that stems from a project I had early in my career duct-taping together another developer's classic ASP applicat^HHH monstrosity and mucking about with IIS and FoxPro (!!). I know it's not classic ASP, but once bitten, lol. I will say that it is modern and performant, but very rigid. I'd defer to others' opinions here because I have mostly avoided it. But in general, the tooling is great, and I don't encounter much that ties you to a Windows box anymore. I know there are some differences in platform support, but most of the rough edges were handled in the early days of .NET Core 2 & 3. Now that we're way past that (the "traditional" .NET merged with .NET Core in a combined version 5 release). Now that it's on version 9, the language features and low-level hits keep coming. I can, today, write code that is 99% of what you can get from C++ (and in some edge cases can exceed it), compiled to native code, that will run on Windows & Linux (x64 & arm64), BSD & MacOS without too much trouble. And as a fellow HNer pointed out the other day on an unrelated thread, the native interop is painless. You can load .dll, .so, .dylib files with ease. No frankenstein FFI (ala Go or Java). The language is safe. GC can be avoided (or controlled), and it offers raw pointers, manual memory manipulation with spans, and more low-level features through the unsafe subset of functions. I know people like to say this started as a rip-off of Java, and there is some truth to that, but I have too much respect for Anders to believe he set out to rip off Java part and parcel. There was a method to his madness, and from my perspective, C# has always been a step ahead in programmer ergonomics (but definitely not performance). Maybe that's due to the sheer intertia of the Java ecosystem, or to Sun and then Oracle being more conservative, I don't know. Hell, it probably had more to do with Microsoft's reputation. I value programmer ergonomics and tooling, almost above all else, and I am a happy camper. You can write C# from several different angles as you see fit, and in most cases it checks all the boxes for a large subset of projects.

Atotalnoob 2y ago

C# has changed a ton in the last few years, it’s definitely 4/4 for me…

CharlieDigital 2y ago
It's getting closer and closer to TypeScript.
- yodon 2y ago
  You presumably are aware that C# and TypeScript share the same original language designer
  - CharlieDigital 2y ago
    Yes; GOAT. What's interesting is whereas a very large community has embraced TS, C# feels like it hasn't gotten as much love despite being so similar at a language construct level (async, exceptions, generics, etc.)
- Atotalnoob 2y ago
  They were made by the same dude, so it makes sense they are similar.
- pier25 2y ago
  Probably the other way around...
  - CharlieDigital 2y ago
    It's bi-directional. In recent years, C# has gained destructuring, collection initializers, tuples, and a few other niceties. JS/TS are missing expression matching that C# gained, but there's a proposal for it for JS. C# is missing discriminated unions, but there's a proposal in process for it.

caspper69 2y ago

I am a huge C# advocate, and with the AOT stuff since .NET 7, they are really working overtime to add features for safe low-level operations. Some of the niceties over the last several versions include immutable record types, stack allocated structs (ref structs), lambdas (and a host of enhancements thereof since), async/await (of course), generic math ops, platform intrinsics, pattern matching, AOT, nullable types, robust generics, reflection, dynamic types, etc. The big thing I expect next is algebraic data types. The language has really grown by leaps and bounds, but it doesn't ever feel overwhelming, and it has really kept its verbosity to a minimum without turning into a soup of hieroglyphics. That being said, I have found the Android/iOS solutions to be underwhelming. I understand the iOS side a bit, but I thought Android would be better. That's not to say you can't make great applications using C# on these platforms, just that it requires more effort. I'm also not a huge fan of ASP.Net. I've never really cared for it, and I think that stems from a project I had early in my career duct-taping together another developer's classic ASP applicat^HHH monstrosity and mucking about with IIS and FoxPro (!!). I know it's not classic ASP, but once bitten, lol. I will say that it is modern and performant, but very rigid. I'd defer to others' opinions here because I have mostly avoided it. But in general, the tooling is great, and I don't encounter much that ties you to a Windows box anymore. I know there are some differences in platform support, but most of the rough edges were handled in the early days of .NET Core 2 & 3. Now that we're way past that (the "traditional" .NET merged with .NET Core in a combined version 5 release). Now that it's on version 9, the language features and low-level hits keep coming. I can, today, write code that is 99% of what you can get from C++ (and in some edge cases can exceed it), compiled to native code, that will run on Windows & Linux (x64 & arm64), BSD & MacOS without too much trouble. And as a fellow HNer pointed out the other day on an unrelated thread, the native interop is painless. You can load .dll, .so, .dylib files with ease. No frankenstein FFI (ala Go or Java). The language is safe. GC can be avoided (or controlled), and it offers raw pointers, manual memory manipulation with spans, and more low-level features through the unsafe subset of functions. I know people like to say this started as a rip-off of Java, and there is some truth to that, but I have too much respect for Anders to believe he set out to rip off Java part and parcel. There was a method to his madness, and from my perspective, C# has always been a step ahead in programmer ergonomics (but definitely not performance). Maybe that's due to the sheer intertia of the Java ecosystem, or to Sun and then Oracle being more conservative, I don't know. Hell, it probably had more to do with Microsoft's reputation. I value programmer ergonomics and tooling, almost above all else, and I am a happy camper. You can write C# from several different angles as you see fit, and in most cases it checks all the boxes for a large subset of projects.