The Future of C#, Part One

infoblog » The Future of C#, Part One

infoblog » The Future of C#, Part One — Wed, 08 Oct 2008 18:47:53 GMT

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infoblog » The Future of C#, Part One

infoblog » The Future of C#, Part One — Wed, 08 Oct 2008 18:48:24 GMT

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re: The Future of C#, Part One

Frederik Siekmann — Wed, 08 Oct 2008 19:55:04 GMT

Since you can't write about the features in bucket 1 at the moment maybe you could write something about the features in bucket 4 or even 5 - you know not the stupid ones that were obviously bad ideas but the promising ones that seemed very interesting at the beginning but than ... something aweful happenend and now it is extremly unlikely that they will ever become features of some future version of c#.

But maybe I'm the only one who would find this interesting ;)

re: The Future of C#, Part One

Chris — Wed, 08 Oct 2008 20:33:41 GMT

Visual Studio 2010 and .NET Framework 4.0 Overview

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/vstudio/products/cc948977.aspx

re: The Future of C#, Part One

Tom Kirby-Green — Wed, 08 Oct 2008 20:41:02 GMT

Argh.. Tease. I see a blog headline like "The Future of C#" and then we're told to wait! Do you have any idea how torturous this is for a rapid .NET fanboy ;-)

re: The Future of C#, Part One

Anders Borum — Wed, 08 Oct 2008 21:41:59 GMT

When I read this blog post (just having finished viewing Anders Hejlsbergs presentation at the JAOO in Denmark a few weeks ago), it's probably not too hard to see where the trend is going for programming languages in general. Everybody is talking about dynamic languages (dynamic keyword?), parallelism and concurrency but then again, we won't know until PDC.

I'm just hoping that supprt for covariant return types made it to bucket 1 but I'm not going to start that debate again; somebody might step up and slap me at PDC. Then again, if this indeed is going to happen I promise to send champaign to the C# team - honestly.

re: The Future of C#, Part One

Erik — Wed, 08 Oct 2008 22:51:30 GMT

@Frederik - I'd be interested in seeing that as well.

re: The Future of C#, Part One

Jon Skeet — Wed, 08 Oct 2008 23:43:58 GMT

Like everyone else, I'm looking forward to hearing what's going to happen. One particularly interesting point sprang out from your post though:

"And (2) just being a good feature is not enough. Features have to be so compelling that they are worth the enormous dollar costs of designing, implementing, testing, documenting and shipping the feature."

Those are all relevant costs for Microsoft, but not for the language itself. I'm not saying they should be ignored - far from it, I do understand the practicalities of it. However, I'm possibly more interested in the costs of adding complexity to the language in terms of the difficulty of developers learning it and using it effectively.

What I would love to hear some time (but probably never will!) is a list of features which are useful enough to merit inclusion in an abstract sense - i.e. they would make the language genuinely better, despite the added complication - but which won't happen due to the real-life cost of design/implementation. It seems to me that the dollar cost of designing/implementing a feature is likely to be significantly easier to measure than the complexity cost.

re: The Future of C#, Part One

Pop Catalin — Thu, 09 Oct 2008 02:09:43 GMT

Awww , when I saw the title my blood pressure started to rise and my and I could feel my heart beating while devouring the article .... till the I saw the end of it, it was just a teaser :(, this is so cruel. (Kidding about the cruel part ;) )

Can't wait for next your posts, you guys are certainly my superheroes, keep up the good work.

re: The Future of C#, Part One

WEB — Thu, 09 Oct 2008 04:13:00 GMT

No C#! Thank God! C# lives, and C# lives forever. A thousand years from now, Virginia, nay, ten times ten thousand years from now, C# will continue to make glad the heart of childhood.

re: The Future of C#, Part One

Chris Nahr — Thu, 09 Oct 2008 10:22:50 GMT

"Of course, I note also that we have not announced that there even will be a language called C# 4."

I knew it! Visual Studio 10 will replace C# with a hybrid of Logo and APL. You read it here first, people!

re: The Future of C#, Part One

Hamish Smith — Fri, 10 Oct 2008 01:55:04 GMT

A similar thread exists on Stackoverflow.

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/138367/most-wanted-feature-for-c-40

re: The Future of C#, Part One

leppie — Sat, 11 Oct 2008 02:17:50 GMT

Please give us call/cc (call-with-current-continuation) :)

re: The Future of C#, Part One

Arielr — Sun, 12 Oct 2008 15:43:22 GMT

I'd very much like to see what was in the fourth and fifth buckets, yes.

It's even more interesting than the first two, methinks.

re: The Future of C#, Part One

ryan — Tue, 14 Oct 2008 05:55:27 GMT

another vote for the 4th and 5th buckets

re: The Future of C#, Part One

Néstor — Wed, 15 Oct 2008 02:22:46 GMT

My vote too for 4th and 5th buckets.

If you cannot talk about C# 4.0 then talk about what is not in it (and why).

“The C# Programming Language Third Edition” and thoughts on language evolution

B# .NET Blog — Mon, 20 Oct 2008 05:22:57 GMT

With a hypothetical next release of the C# language around the corner (more about that after Anders,

re: The Future of C#, Part One

Bo — Tue, 21 Oct 2008 04:31:39 GMT

Will Microsoft ever care to design a programming language that is good for scientific programming?

We need a language that supports complex numbers, matrix, and vectors.

re: The Future of C#, Part One

Eric Lippert — Tue, 21 Oct 2008 16:47:05 GMT

How about F#? It is used in the financial and scientific computing communities.

re: The Future of C#, Part One

Bo — Tue, 21 Oct 2008 19:17:51 GMT

Hi Eric,

Thanks a lot for the pointer. It looks great so far.

Maybe we are finally coming out of the age of Fortran! If this is true, the potential impact will be enormous!

It looks like I will have a busy Christmas, in a good way. Thanks again!

re: The Future of C#, Part One

Is conversion included? — Wed, 22 Oct 2008 00:26:14 GMT

Is there a cross compiler to convert VB.NET code to C#? It is on our must have list since we have standardized on C# and away from VB.NET. This would be a big plus because over time C# and VB.NET should move together and converge into an identical feature set.

re: The Future of C#, Part One

Bo — Thu, 23 Oct 2008 06:21:10 GMT

Hi Eric,

To be honest, I still do not understand why C# does not have complex numbers built in. It would be such a trivial thing to do. (if there is an exuse for matrix)

The only conclusion that I can draw from it is Microsoft never cares about what scientists or engineers think or use. We use complex as much as we use double!

This partially explains to me why Microsoft is disliked on campuses (to put it mildly), which I did not understand for a while.

While scientists are poor guys who do not buy much software, we do tell our students what to learn and use. That is a lot of potential users and customers!

If only Java had better support for scientific computing, Sun Micro would not be in its position today.

re: The Future of C#, Part One

Jim — Thu, 23 Oct 2008 19:55:17 GMT

I second Bo's comment about adding complex number support. The engineering community is a large relatively untapped market...we would love to be able to see native support of complex numbers in a compliler!

True, there are many third party numerical libraries available that fill this need, but having a built-in complex type would greatly simplify the use of these libraries -- remember most engineers are engineers, not elegant programmers. I don't see it as creating bloat or complexity (pardon the pun) in the existing Math library...it would require overloading for Abs, +-*/, exp,log,and trig functions, as well as the creation of a new ' (conjugate) operator.

Please, please, please. Minimum effort/code change on MS part in exchange for much wider (and well-funded!) audience.

Community Convergence XLVII

Charlie Calvert's Community Blog — Tue, 04 Nov 2008 00:11:48 GMT

Welcome to the 47th Community Convergence. We had a very successful trip to PDC this year. In this post

Variância e Contra-variância: uma dívida

Arquitetura em Pauta — Sat, 29 Nov 2008 17:31:53 GMT

Tenho que pagar uma dívida aqui. Falei na volta do PDC que iria falar sobre variância e contra-variância

C# Dynamic - CSharp's new feature of the coming version 4.0

Journal of Abu Sayed Mohammad Ismail — Wed, 24 Dec 2008 09:38:21 GMT

Very good resources for the coming version... Sam Ng Dynamic in C# Part One Dynamic in C# Part Two Chris

re: The Future of C#, Part One

Reineir Post — Mon, 12 Jan 2009 12:23:46 GMT

Is conversion included?: Last February, I converted a 100,000 line VB.NET code base to C#. Didn't manage to find a tool that makes it painless. Let me know if you want details (<reinpost@win.tue.nl>).

In Foof We Trust: A Dialogue

Fabulous Adventures In Coding — Fri, 22 May 2009 20:43:33 GMT

User : The typeof(T) operator in C# essentially means “compiler, generate some code that gives me an

В Инфуфа веруем: диалог

Блог Эрика Липперта (перевод) — Wed, 03 Jun 2009 23:57:56 GMT

Пользователь: Оператор typeof(T) в C#, по существу, означает «компилятор, сгенерируй некий код, который