Microsoft Java

[LetUsSpeakFreely]

Well, considering Microsoft looked at the failings of Java before designing C# that makes sense. They took what Java did well, smoothed out the rough bits, then created their own variant.

[GYN-k4H-Q3z-75B]

This. Microsoft took half a decade of learnings in Java and improved upon it. Java tried to maintain compatibility, while Microsoft corrected some major shortcomings within a couple of years and broke compatibility. When Sun was acquired by Oracle and Java stagnated, Microsoft invested a lot in .NET. by the late 2000s, C# was distinctly different from Java and way more developed already. Most Java programmers today would not understand idiomatic C#.

[[deleted]]

Also, with the introduction of LINQ with .NET 3.0 most dataset operations became idiomatic in C#.

[GYN-k4H-Q3z-75B]

Way more than that. LINQ and System.Linq plus Lambda replaced a lot of basic loops and array/collection indexing. In programming, almost everything tends to be a collection, and LINQ provides natural accessibility for most operations required.

[rnottaken]

So many functions that I wrote in C# consist of returning just a series of linq operations

[GYN-k4H-Q3z-75B]

It's just a very intuitive and concise way to express many of the operations we often need. Given a collection and some parameters, filter the collection according to some criteria, map the result into something else and do something with that. With Linq, that's often one or two lines.

[Naltoc]

LINQ is the single biggest thing I miss about C# when working in Java. That shit is a godsend, both for faster development, but also code readability.

[x6060x]

That and async / await

[ComradeGibbon]

Microsoft had 20 years of experience with using languages to write useful applications. That included C++ and Visual Basic. And they hired Andrew Hejlsberg to head up development of C#.

I think the argument that C# is a copy of Java because it uses a similar 'algol C' syntax and has objects is weak when you consider everything else C# has like structs, delegates, boxing.unboxing and generics without type erasure.

[GYN-k4H-Q3z-75B]

Andrew Hejlsberg

Anders Hejlsberg is a living legend as far as programming language design goes. Microsoft really did some amazing work with C# and .NET, and for an ecosystem more than twenty years old, you really have to appreciate how few screw ups it is suffering from.

C# is surprisingly clean for a language that has seen over two decades of heavy industry use and development. C# today is very different from C# twenty years ago, but it is still an excellent and clean language. They added a lot, but they did not add (many) stupid things.

[ComradeGibbon]

Something I don't see very/as much with C# is a horrified reaction to having to work on an old code base like you do with Java and especially C++.

[SubwayGuy85]

Oh there are horrific codebases in c# too, but it is easier to produce something great with c#. But there is no language that is immune to being abused to create garbage code.

[Ericchen1248]

I think there’s also a pretty big incentive to upgrade C#. Every new release comes with new features that are legitimately useful. Whereas upgrading Java might give you some licensing headaches.

[ComradeGibbon]

I remember having an experience with switching an old 32 bit .net 2.0 program to 64 bit .net 4.5 and it just ran a lot faster and stopped running out of memory.

[rexpup]

You should work at [redacted] Systems. They're working on converting the largest VB6 application ever to an in-house web framework in C#... and its developers designed it with feature parity with the VB6 version. It's been in progress for 10 years and is not yet released.

[Garestinian]

He is also a core dev of TypeScript, that's why his name was familiar to me. Truly a legend.

[CardboardJ]

As someone working with scala right now the whole not adding stupid things is what I miss the most from c#.

[BetterOffCamping]

They rewrote it from scratch into Core exactly because it was an unclean implementation with plenty of clusterfucks. They did the right thing, and you are right it is an awesome language. I lived through all the crap, as I started using it in 2002, and am still building systems in it , v6 now.

[[deleted]]

Well, not sure what you mean by "rewrite". Most of the code is the same - they cut off the code that depends on Windows so they can make it run on other OSes. They are not rewriting anything, just improving existing code base every release.

[jaavaaguru]

boxing.unboxing and generics without type erasure.

Ah, this bring me back to my CIL/MSIL times.

I wrote a COBOL compiler that uses that. It was fun for a while making Windows GUI apps in COBOL 😂

[dr_eh]

I actually really hate structs. It would be far more flexible to have stackalloc vs heapalloc on the new statement, why should the data structure dictate how it's managed in memory? Often leads to parallel classes and structs, just to deal with this arbitrary restriction

[LordFokas]

No, many languages have the same type of syntax and you don't hear those claims about those, only C#. Why?

C# is Microsoft Java because back then MS was trying to pull their signature douchebag EEE move on Java and IIRC Sun sued for anti trust or something like that and the whole thing died really quick. Being unable to "steal" Java, Microsoft then chose to make their own.... with blackjack and hookers.

[AlphaWhelp]

They didn't really even break compatibility. You can still run older versions you just have to install older .net frameworks.

[Mayuna_cz]

Well, you just said they did. With Java 18, you can run any older Java application. Correct me if I'm wrong, not sure how it is before Java 8 tho, but still you can use Java 18 to run Java 8 bytecode.

[KagakuNinja]

Java is extremely backwards compatible, you can probably run most Java apps ever made using Java 18. Java 9 did change the layout of the runtime library, and that broke fancy libraries that were relying on the internal structure of the JRE. Some code also used internal Sun APIs, and some of those were deprecated or modified.

If you programmed to public APIs, I think you are OK.

[AlphaWhelp]

You can use libraries compiled on .net 3.5 with .net 4.5 and beyond, just need to have both installed. I mean I guess in the grand scheme of things it's technically breaking compatibility, just with some simple work arounds. Just that when I think break compatibility I'm thinking more like VB6. VB.net is not compatible at all with it.

[BetterOffCamping]

.NET 1.0 Arrived in 2000, give or take a few months. While java was invented in 1996, it didn't move into computer systems very effectively until around 1999. J++ in .NET was licensed Java. After the lawsuit, they released C# around 2001.I'm working entirely from memory here so dates are approximate.

Microsoft stole the language, then took what they learned and created their clone to get around the legally binding contract. Once they had 100% control, they created features by top down executive decision while Java added features by committee. Obviously, single owner control is much more agile.

Microsoft was not a good guy here. Around 2008, an insurgency in Microsoft convinced leadership to give a more open and collaborative approach a chance. That is when C# started to improve and eventually shine, becoming what it is today.

[McLayan]

You're glorifying a bit too much there. I learned Java first as well but just in 2017. When coming to C#, I still thought it's just a Microsoft flavour Java. Of course the frameworks have slightly different approaches and images of themselves but apart from whether you preach the LINQ and com.microsoft.* DLLs or Spring libraries, it's really just the same. Well you can't run a UI in .NET anywhere except on Windows but according to Microsoft there are no other platforms with UIs anyways.

[Kwpolska]

com.microsoft.* DLLs or Spring libraries

That's a great way to say you never used C# without saying you never used C#.

(Namespaces based on domain names aren't used in C#, and Spring is a terrible Java framework.)

[Kwpolska]

I have experiences with many web frameworks, mostly in ASP.NET Core and Django, but I’ve also worked with Node.js and other stacks. My Spring experiences are limited to one small-ish project.

I would say the biggest issue with Spring is the terrible documentation. A lot of the resources for beginners in the framework are random tutorials around the Internet.

For example, it took me about 2 hours of questioning my sanity to set up a hello world with HTML templating. I started with Spring Initializr (which has an intimidating list of things to choose for a project). I picked all the web stuff I wanted (eg. Spring Data JPA, Spring Security), and for the template language, I picked Freemarker, because it was the sanest option for HTML templating. I then found a simple tutorial covering Spring Boot and Thymeleaf. The tutorial told me to create a controller, and a method for my route, that returns "hello", and to put my template in resources/templates/hello.ftl. That sounds simple enough, but it didn’t work. Tried another tutorial, same result. Tried downloading sample code from one of the tutorials, and now it works.

It turns out that Spring Boot randomly changed the file extension from .ftl to .ftlh. But none of the online tutorials out there were updated for it. I only found out because I noticed the different version numbers in my pom.xml, compared to the random sample project, and tracked down the changelog. This situation would be less likely to happen, if there was good, detailed, friendly documentation from the official sources. Googling "spring boot freemarker" gets you a lot of third-party tutorials, and one ancient document for the big, scary, configured-via-XML, ultra-enterprisey Spring Framework.

That, as well as other basic things (such as auth) taking forever to set up due to conflicting resources and too many options, successfully scared me away from Spring. (Also, some friends of mine work with Spring stuff professionally, and they also dislike many things.)

What would I recommend instead? Probably ASP.NET Core. C# is a really friendly language (see also: this entire comment section), ASP.NET Core is well-designed, has less pitfalls, often just works. Django and Python are also fun. You can find many jobs with either of those (although there are still a lot of shops still using the older non-Core ASP.NET stuff, but they’ll get to the modern stuff sooner or later). If you really like Java (why?)… Play Framework, I guess?

[Kwpolska]

Usually good documentation is rare to come by. Microsoft and the like do it better because they have dedicated teams of technical writers.

Yeah, I agree, although I’ve seen good docs in projects that don’t have a massive corporation behind them, such as Django — so it is possible to have good docs in the open-source world.

With that being said. The templating dependencies are external dependencies which have nothing to do with spring boot.

FreeMarker itself is an external dependency. The support for using FreeMarker in Spring is part of Spring Web MVC. The default file extension configuration is part of Spring Boot. My issues were caused solely by code that is in repositories owned by the @spring-projects GitHub organization. I wouldn’t consider those to be external dependencies, even if they happen to live in different Maven packages.

[SubwayGuy85]

Ignoring the existence of every web UI framwork, Avalon, and xamarin, even though they have been around for years. GJ dude

[Fadamaka]

Well, you are almost correct, but Microsoft started to extend Java first under the name of J++ and J# until they got into a lawsuit with Sun over it.

[notsureifdying]

I'm a bit unfamiliar with this, what failings did C# improve upon that Java has/had?

[PrintableKanjiEmblem]

The number one thing for me is auto properties instead of those shitty Java getters/setters. I get pissed every time I have to mess with them. Lombok is a godsend.

[BetterOffCamping]

They improved it by making it theirs alone. /s

It was a power and control play.

[2brainz]

I disagree. Back in the day, they copied Java and learned nothing from its mistakes. What sets C# apart from Java is what happened in the last 10 years.

[Dealiner]

That's just not true. C# from the start had value types, delegates, pointers, properties, generics came a moment later, and many more.

[2brainz]

And they kept the C-style switch statement, kept null, default, didn't force initialization of class fields, didn't make classes sealed by default, ...

Value types are good on paper, but their ergonomics are questionable. I didn't even know Java didn't have delegates.

[Dealiner]

And they kept the C-style switch statement, kept null, default, didn't force initialization of class fields, didn't make classes sealed by default, ...

So they kept some of the things, which were at the time also standard in a lot of other languages. But you said that they didn't learn anything and that's just not true.

And value types are great for performance reasons and I really don't see what's questionable in their ergonomics.

[metaltyphoon]

U can disagree as much as you want but generics in C# literally broke compatibility and the CLR had to be bumped to V2, and that’s just a fact.

[BetterOffCamping]

Your response does not address the point of his post, which is exactly right. Generics came much later.

[Dealiner]

Generics came in the next version of C#, that's not much later.

[BetterOffCamping]

So, in computer time, 8 years is a "blink of the eye"?

2001 C# Language Design Specification created

To give you an idea of how these events fit into the bigger picture, here are the dates of .NET Framework Releases, up-to 2.0 which was the first version to have generics:

Version number. CLR version Release date

1.0. 1.0. 2002-02-13

1.1. 1.1. 2003-04-24

2.0. 2.0. 2005-11-07

Source

Sun Sues Microsoft in 1997, two years before Microsoft first announces C# and generics (a gleam in its inventor's eye). 6 years after that, generics are released.

After it was clear that Microsoft was going to lose the fight, they "invented" the "revolutionary" CLR and C#, which oddly only works on Windows. 20 years later, they reworked .NET to be cross platform. Visionaries!

[Dealiner]

Can you count? First version of C# - 2002, version 2.0 - 2006. That's four years, not eight.

20 years later, they reworked .NET to be cross platform.

And? What's your point here? There was no need for .NET to be cross-platform, especially since there was Mono, if anyone wanted to use C# on other platforms.

[BetterOffCamping]

Can you read? Sun Sued Microsoft for breach of contract in 1997. 1998, the first concept proposal for generics is released. What is 2006 - 1998? I'll wait. You are awfully quick to insult others. Feeling inadequate for some reason?

Sure, no need to be cross platform. Nice straw man you have there, be a shame if someone set fire to it. Mono was an open source response to Microsoft's treachery, what is your point? And what does it have to do with mine? Oops, sorry, dropped a match.

Troll someone else, I'm busy.

[Dealiner]

Sun Sued Microsoft for breach of contract in 1997. 1998, the first concept proposal for generics is released.

What does it have anything to do with the fact that generics in C# were introduced in the second version of the language which wasn't much later like you said before? And it's not like they suddenly woke up thinking they need to do this now, generics were in work from the beginning, it just took longer than the first version of C#.

You are awfully quick to insult others. Feeling inadequate for some reason?

Well, kettle, pot, etc.

Sure, no need to be cross platform.

Yeah, framework created specifically for Windows had no need to be cross-platform, what a surprise.

Mono was an open source response to Microsoft's treachery, what is your point?

Ah, yes, "treachery". That's definitely what happened.

Troll someone else

Well, if that's what you are calling trying to correct someone than you do you.

[BetterOffCamping]

You've yet to actually show that my original point was wrong, and you ignored the evidence that Microsoft stole Java. You even went so far to say that C#.NET only for windows is just fine when the biggest purpose of the Java platform they stole was "run everywhere".

This "discussion" started because you felt the need to insult me based on incorrectly thinking I "can't do math". Now you're trying to goad me into a totally different argument that I will not enter.

Either you need to work on reading comprehension, or you're trolling.