C# [was Re: How do you choose your programming language ?]

On Monday 21 November 2005 14:22, Nadav Har'El wrote:
> > Secondly The industry takes only languages that was giving to them
> > after chowing and a lot of money investment on them (take Java and C#
> > as two examples).
>
> Java "succeeded" (if you can call it that) because it had genuine
> differences from existing languages. It wasn't the same as C++ with a
> different syntax, or the same as Perl with a different syntax, and so on.
> It had something genuinely different to offer. Of course, you might argue
> (like I do) if this "different" necessarily means better.
>
> C# is a new fad which is very similar to Java, and it will only succeed if
> Microsoft uses its monopoly to somehow enforce it. If Microsoft had wanted,
> Pascal would have become a standard by now...
>

I beg to differ. .NET might be popular and might be from Microsoft, but only 
time can tell if it's a fad or not. Meanwhile:

C# has a cross-platform open-source implementation - Mono, and some other 
open-source components (DotGNU, a C#/Java#/VB# compiler, etc.). From my 
limited experience, it is faster than Java (including Sun's Java JDK) its GUI 
applications take a much shorter time to load, and they also feel much 
snappier than Java. I should note that I didn't try JDK 1.5 yet extensively, 
but the only program I ran that required it, was the Ants "third-generation" 
file-swapping client, and it couldn't even connect and allow me to swap 
songs.[1] I don't recall how snappy it was, but I quickly abandoned it.[2]

There are some very smart open-source people who are writing stuff using .NET. 
Either ASP.NET things, applications for GNOME (E.g: Beagle, F-Spot), or even 
open-source Windows applications. There's also Perl.NET, IronPython, etc. 
which are implementations of dynamic languages above .NET. I myself, have 
contributed two bug-fixes to F-Spot which is written in C# using Gtk#, and it 
wasn't an entirely unpleasant experience. C# seemed pretty much like Java, 
only a bit better (and possibly more complicated) in some respects.

All of these things bid pretty well for .NET (which is much more than just 
C#). One should not rule .NET, just because it came out of Microsoft and 
because it is based on Java. 

Regards,

        Shlomi Fish

[1] - Hi Elad! Yes, I'm "stealing" as always.

[2] - The ironic thing is that one can write perfectly responsive GUIs with 
Perl, Python and friends with Tk, Gtk, Qt, etc. while not doing too much 
effort. And these languages are always tauted as slower than Java.

---------------------------------------------------------------------
Shlomi Fish      shlomif-ik1l9ssToec+JF/nGntIXQ@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Homepage:        http://www.shlomifish.org/

95% of the programmers consider 95% of the code they did not write, in the
bottom 5%.


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