Importance of C# (was Re: IronPython-0.6 is now available!)

[Aaron Watters]

Alan Kennedy <alanmk at hotmail.com> wrote in message news:<D%8Oc.5753$Z14.6982 at news.indigo.ie>...
> ....IMHO, Microsoft have always been masters of the 80/20 rule: making it 
> very simple for users to do 80% of what they want, but leaving them 
> bending over backwards to do the last 20%. Practicality beats purity.
> 
> http://management.about.com/cs/generalmanagement/a/Pareto081202.htm
> 
> But I think MS have done a much better job with the .Net CLR ( == java 
> the virtual machine) and C# ( ~= java the programming language ). They 
> hired lots of clever people, asked them to come up with something 
> java-like, but (better|simpler). The result is, IMHO, quite nice: I 
> felt pretty at home writing C# pretty quickly, mostly because of my 
> java experience....

I felt at home right away primarily because of my Python
experience.  As an exercise I wrote a bplustree implementation

http://bplusdotnet.sourceforge.net

in C#/.NET and translated it to java and python later.  The java
port was the most irritating primarily because java methods cannot
return more than one "new" value (a real pain in the ***).  Another
java irritant was having to declare all the possible exceptions for
all methods (I punted -- everything "throws Exception").  The
python port was a tad bit simpler than the C#
 -- primarily in the derived classes
-- but the speed and safety advantages of type checking in C# were
great advantages.

One of the cooler other things in C# is structs -- which means that C#
can really conveniently be used for high performance numerics, whereas
java can't imo.

Here's hoping mono continues to improve...  -- Aaron Watters

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nothing exceeds like excess.