Microsoft's leader of C# development, writer of the Turbo Pascal system, and lead architect on the Delphi language, Anders Hejlsberg, reveals all there is to know on the history, inspiration, uses and future direction of one of computer programming's most widely used languages - C#. Hejlsberg also offers some insight into the upcoming version of C# (C#4) and the new language F#, as well as what lies ahead in the world of functional programming.
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Member since:2007-07-13
As someone mentioned earlier, most enterprise apps these days target the web. This is by far the largest segment of the development market (in terms of developer dollars) - shrinkwrap apps are quite a small proportion (except this is all the hobbyists see).
Technically C# is pretty cool but doesn't touch Java+Spring+Hibernate+Google Web Toolkit for enterprise development. No, Volta will blow for a few years yet. Our company just got another job (not the first) with a national-level government department whose back-end runs on Sun hardware (since these departments huge), no matter how good you think C# is, it's not going to win us these contracts since the latest version is always hobbled to the Windows platform (limiting to Windows suits Microsoft's business model, but no-one else's) - and no Mono, is too far behind in versions at the moment (despite the hard work of Miguel et al.).
Oh yeah, these days Java runs way faster than C# (which is why Microsoft still doesn't let people publish benchmarks, it in their licensing terms).
Member since:
2005-07-05
Exactly, and JSP and PHP are also awful. It is much easier to write code and maintain code when you structure it well and separate your business logic from your display.
While you can do this to some degree with ASP.NET, JSP, and PHP, they all encourage poor development practices by making it easier to program incorrectly.
Another thing that I think is stupid about ASP.NET is the lack of complete support for it found in VisualStudio. For example, ASP.NET supports multiple levels of template inheritance, but VisualStudio only supports one level of inheritance (this may be different now, but it was one of several limitation of the IDE in past versions).
Also, I don't confuse ASP.NET with ASP. Everyone knows ASP is absolutely worthless. ASP.NET has some value at least. However, if I personally were going to use one of these languages, I'd chose PHP over ASP.NET or JSP; but that's just me.
Edited 2008-10-02 18:31 UTC