4 ms·

There is a Ruby with static typing---it's called C#. Seriously, even though my background is all in non-MS stacks, I did some C# work a few years ago and found

There is a Ruby with static typing---it's called C#. Seriously, even though my background is all in non-MS stacks, I did some C# work a few years ago and found the language surprisingly nice, and with a lot of the features I love from Ruby. It even has type inference like Crystal. (The libraries are not nearly as clean/consistent as Java though.) For folks in the Ruby/Python/Java world, it's something to look at.

thecoffman 13y ago
I have a very similar background/opinion. Almost all of my professional work has been on the *nix stack and I generally like Ruby. During a brief stint in Microsoft-land I found myself super impressed with C#. First class functions, type inference, anonymous types/functions and LINQ make for a really nice general purpose language. Its really a shame its mired in the Microsoft toolchain.
- pjonesdotca 13y ago
  Having tried both C# and Go (both having functions as first class citizens), I'll chose Go. Mono always seems to be behind the M$ release of .NET and I'd rather not bother.
icambron 13y ago
As someone whose last 8 years of professional work have been largely split between...C# and Ruby, I have to disagree. I do agree about C# being quite nice; it's all the things Java should be but isn't. And it's evolving quickly in all the right ways. But it isn't really like Ruby with static typing. The language isn't Rubyish (no mixins or blocks, for example). It makes you put everything in a class, a la Java. It can verbose and is occasionally downright clunky (though syntactically it's categorically slicker than Java). The .NET ecosystem doesn't have the Ruby characteristic of lots of small, fast-evolving libraries that are easy to use. In fact, the C# open source ecosystem is kinda poor in general and not a huge part of most developer's lives, whereas Ruby's ecosystem is vibrant and an integral part of its coding culture. Another way to put all that is that if C# were purely dynamically typed, it wouldn't feel anything like Ruby. I do see what you're saying: LINQ feels like a static (and lazy!) version of Ruby's Enumerable module, the lambdas look similar, C# actually does have optional dynamic typing, and C# is increasingly full of nice developer-friendly features. In general, I'm a fan. But switching between them doesn't feel like just a static/dynamic change.
- thecoffman 13y ago
  Interesting - I found the lambda syntax of LINQ to be quite "Ruby like" someList.FindAll(i => i < 2) .Select(i => i * 2) .GroupBy(i => (i % 2) == 0 ? "even" : "odd") Is about as close to Ruby's Enumerable as I've found in a mainstream/enterprise language (unless you include Scala).
  - icambron 13y ago
    Yeah, I mostly of agree with that and sort of said so in my post. Not sure it has much impact on my central point though. One really key difference with LINQ is that it doesn't produce arrays (or dictionaries, as in your example); it produces Enumerators, which you then have to do call toList() or toDictionary() on. That laziness is actually an awesome feature and my favorite thing about LINQ, because it can massively improve performance by shortcutting work and not creating intermediate arrays. You can even work on infinite sequences with it. Besides performance, it's just tastier. It's so great I actually wrote a Ruby library to imitate it: https://github.com/icambron/lazer https://github.com/icambron/lazer
    - VexXtreme 13y ago
      Is LINQ really fast/performant though? Wouldn't the above expression cause three sequential loops to run? One of the biggest performance issues I've seen with modern .NET code is people abusing LINQ and lambdas. Chaining functions like this is most decidedly not fast. I once wrote a library that had do do some heavy signal processing on large data sets, and since I wanted to ship the first version as soon as possible, I just used LINQ in a lot of functions to save time. It wasn't very performant so later I rewrote most of the functions to use standard native code such as loops for iteration, hashmaps for caching and all sorts of improvements like that. I completely got rid of LINQ in that version and for many functions the runtime went down from something like 500ms-1000ms to microsecond area. So sure, LINQ makes development fast and it's very nice to be able to write code such as .Skip(10).Take(50).Where(x => ...). On most web projects, it won't make a huge difference. I've seen Rails "developers" use ActiveRecord in such a way that they would create double and triple nested loops and then hit the database multiple times by using enumerable functions on ActiveRecord objects without realizing how this works, what's going on behind the curtains and so on. I've seen .NET devs do similar things using EntityFramework. So yeah, it's convenient and all, but it can also be very dangerous when used by someone who doesn't understand the fundamentals behind these principles.
i_s 13y ago
> (The libraries are not nearly as clean/consistent as Java though.) I've had the complete opposite experience. I've found when it comes to libraries, C# has fewer, but higher quality than Java ones. I've also found C# to have a much more intuitive standard library. In C#, I can often just figure out how a standard library class works purely through the type system and the IDE, while in Java, I'd have to search through documentation more frequently.
- manojlds 13y ago
  Don't forget that once you get into it, VS is an awesome IDE.
kybernetyk 13y ago
C# is a great language, I give you that. But the runtime is major turn off.
manojlds 13y ago
Plug - https://github.com/manojlds/cmd https://github.com/manojlds/cmd Shows some of the "dynamic" goodness of C#.

thecoffman 13y ago

I have a very similar background/opinion. Almost all of my professional work has been on the *nix stack and I generally like Ruby. During a brief stint in Microsoft-land I found myself super impressed with C#. First class functions, type inference, anonymous types/functions and LINQ make for a really nice general purpose language. Its really a shame its mired in the Microsoft toolchain.

pjonesdotca 13y ago
Having tried both C# and Go (both having functions as first class citizens), I'll chose Go. Mono always seems to be behind the M$ release of .NET and I'd rather not bother.

icambron 13y ago

As someone whose last 8 years of professional work have been largely split between...C# and Ruby, I have to disagree. I do agree about C# being quite nice; it's all the things Java should be but isn't. And it's evolving quickly in all the right ways. But it isn't really like Ruby with static typing. The language isn't Rubyish (no mixins or blocks, for example). It makes you put everything in a class, a la Java. It can verbose and is occasionally downright clunky (though syntactically it's categorically slicker than Java). The .NET ecosystem doesn't have the Ruby characteristic of lots of small, fast-evolving libraries that are easy to use. In fact, the C# open source ecosystem is kinda poor in general and not a huge part of most developer's lives, whereas Ruby's ecosystem is vibrant and an integral part of its coding culture. Another way to put all that is that if C# were purely dynamically typed, it wouldn't feel anything like Ruby. I do see what you're saying: LINQ feels like a static (and lazy!) version of Ruby's Enumerable module, the lambdas look similar, C# actually does have optional dynamic typing, and C# is increasingly full of nice developer-friendly features. In general, I'm a fan. But switching between them doesn't feel like just a static/dynamic change.

thecoffman 13y ago
Interesting - I found the lambda syntax of LINQ to be quite "Ruby like" someList.FindAll(i => i < 2) .Select(i => i * 2) .GroupBy(i => (i % 2) == 0 ? "even" : "odd") Is about as close to Ruby's Enumerable as I've found in a mainstream/enterprise language (unless you include Scala).
- icambron 13y ago
  Yeah, I mostly of agree with that and sort of said so in my post. Not sure it has much impact on my central point though. One really key difference with LINQ is that it doesn't produce arrays (or dictionaries, as in your example); it produces Enumerators, which you then have to do call toList() or toDictionary() on. That laziness is actually an awesome feature and my favorite thing about LINQ, because it can massively improve performance by shortcutting work and not creating intermediate arrays. You can even work on infinite sequences with it. Besides performance, it's just tastier. It's so great I actually wrote a Ruby library to imitate it: https://github.com/icambron/lazer https://github.com/icambron/lazer
  - VexXtreme 13y ago
    Is LINQ really fast/performant though? Wouldn't the above expression cause three sequential loops to run? One of the biggest performance issues I've seen with modern .NET code is people abusing LINQ and lambdas. Chaining functions like this is most decidedly not fast. I once wrote a library that had do do some heavy signal processing on large data sets, and since I wanted to ship the first version as soon as possible, I just used LINQ in a lot of functions to save time. It wasn't very performant so later I rewrote most of the functions to use standard native code such as loops for iteration, hashmaps for caching and all sorts of improvements like that. I completely got rid of LINQ in that version and for many functions the runtime went down from something like 500ms-1000ms to microsecond area. So sure, LINQ makes development fast and it's very nice to be able to write code such as .Skip(10).Take(50).Where(x => ...). On most web projects, it won't make a huge difference. I've seen Rails "developers" use ActiveRecord in such a way that they would create double and triple nested loops and then hit the database multiple times by using enumerable functions on ActiveRecord objects without realizing how this works, what's going on behind the curtains and so on. I've seen .NET devs do similar things using EntityFramework. So yeah, it's convenient and all, but it can also be very dangerous when used by someone who doesn't understand the fundamentals behind these principles.

i_s 13y ago

> (The libraries are not nearly as clean/consistent as Java though.) I've had the complete opposite experience. I've found when it comes to libraries, C# has fewer, but higher quality than Java ones. I've also found C# to have a much more intuitive standard library. In C#, I can often just figure out how a standard library class works purely through the type system and the IDE, while in Java, I'd have to search through documentation more frequently.

manojlds 13y ago
Don't forget that once you get into it, VS is an awesome IDE.

kybernetyk 13y ago

C# is a great language, I give you that. But the runtime is major turn off.

manojlds 13y ago

Plug - https://github.com/manojlds/cmd https://github.com/manojlds/cmd Shows some of the "dynamic" goodness of C#.