Interesting, thanks. I didn't understand how Don Syme needed to convince Microsoft since he is part of Microsoft.
From the blog:
> Generics for .NET and C# in their current form almost didn't happen: it was a very close call, and the feature almost didn't make the cut for Whidbey (Visual Studio 2005). Features such as running CLR code on the database were given higher priority.
> ...
> Ultimately, an erasure model of generics would have been adopted, as for Java, since the CLR team would never have pursued a in-the-VM generics design without external help.
I have no particular reason to doubt his perspective - and I certainly don't have any inside knowledge - but a feature not making the cut for version N doesn't always imply that a shitty version would have been implemented in version N+1.
> The world is as it is today because we act when we have the chance to act, and because we invest in foundations that last the test of time.
Could this be a case of the victors getting to write the canonical history?
MS language tech is pretty much stagnated for 8 years now. Feels
like IE all over again.
Nah. Sure, C# 6.0 is largely smaller tweaks here and there, but by all measures the team has been busy with Rosyln, which is huge.
Out of curiosity, are there language features that you think should be added to C#? For C# to be like IE, the world would need to have moved on and C# would have to be behind in this new world. It doesn't seem like that's the case. And compared to Java, C# moves at a pace that's absolutely breakneck. What has Java gotten in the pat 8 years? Crappy not-closures?
They trounced their major competitor (Java)
Microsoft may have trounced Java-on-Windows, but overall Java is more popular than C# by a significant margin.
Edit: This is probably too negative of a comment. It's just years of frustration with MS coming out, that's all.
I've not got much inside knowledge. I was an MVP 2003-2005 on C# then CLR and Security. I wasn't very knowledgeable back then, but I don't recall any push for FP style, at all. I think the fact that C# originally didn't have lambdas, then added them with an 8-character keyword says enough.
Implementing better generics later? I doubt it. There's been no CLR changes since v2, as far as the type system or IL goes. So that's 10 years, no additions, just added tweaks here and there. Hell, even now, .NET Native relies on source-level transformations, instead of being implemented at the IL-level.
They've been hyping Rosyln. Great. One famous problem with C#'s compiler is that its design made it very hard to add type inference consistently to the language[1]. They rewrote the compiler, did they fix that? Nope. Even worse: My watch says it's 2015, but VS/C# still doesn't ship a REPL. Come on. (Yeah maybe "C# Interactive" will show up some day now that 2015 has RTM'd. But not today.)
The core of my complaint is that they have a mindset of implementing things as hard-coded scenarios, versus general purpose features. Async. Dynamic. Duck typing. Operators. Even the lambda syntax being ambiguous between expressions and code. Why? Cause they choose an end-user scenario, e.g. LINQ, then implemented just what they need to get that scenario done. That lacks elegance. It adds conceptual overhead.
Java has more popularity because MS decided to shun non-Windows. Essentially no one prefers Java-the-language over C#, but Windows-only is a nonstarter in many cases. My IE comment is saying that, like IE, MS has removed resources and the drive to seriously improve its language tech, as there are no real competitors in their space, language-wise.
P.S. I still think C# is a good language in relative terms and they have brilliant people doing great work on it. And the polish of the tooling - wow, yeah it's amazing. I'm just disappointed that MS doesn't seem to be interested in really upping-the-ante and being a leader here. F# is basically a "best-of-breed" language that'd put them solidly ahead, yet they neglect it.
Of course I have - including when I was at Microsoft.
The difference is that I don't refer to my employer in the third person. I thought the phrasing was strange. It confused me why he needed to convince Microsoft ("MSCorp") since he is a part of Microsoft.
Reading the blog post linked in the comment I was replying to brought the needed clarity: he was talking about convincing Microsoft-not-Microsoft-Research ("MSCorp") while he was at Microsoft Research.
From the blog:
> Generics for .NET and C# in their current form almost didn't happen: it was a very close call, and the feature almost didn't make the cut for Whidbey (Visual Studio 2005). Features such as running CLR code on the database were given higher priority.
> ...
> Ultimately, an erasure model of generics would have been adopted, as for Java, since the CLR team would never have pursued a in-the-VM generics design without external help.
I have no particular reason to doubt his perspective - and I certainly don't have any inside knowledge - but a feature not making the cut for version N doesn't always imply that a shitty version would have been implemented in version N+1.
> The world is as it is today because we act when we have the chance to act, and because we invest in foundations that last the test of time.
Could this be a case of the victors getting to write the canonical history?
Nah. Sure, C# 6.0 is largely smaller tweaks here and there, but by all measures the team has been busy with Rosyln, which is huge.Out of curiosity, are there language features that you think should be added to C#? For C# to be like IE, the world would need to have moved on and C# would have to be behind in this new world. It doesn't seem like that's the case. And compared to Java, C# moves at a pace that's absolutely breakneck. What has Java gotten in the pat 8 years? Crappy not-closures?
Microsoft may have trounced Java-on-Windows, but overall Java is more popular than C# by a significant margin.