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points

by 72deluxe11 hours ago |

comments

by CharlieDigital8 hours ago|

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C# is the other direction, IMO.

I've been using C# since the first release in 2003/4 timeline?

Aside from a few high profile language features like LINQ, generics, `async/await`, the syntax has grown, but the key additions have made the language simpler to use and more terse. Tuples and destructuring for example. Spread operators for collections. Switch expressions and pattern matching. These are mostly syntactic affordances.

You don't have to use any of them; you can write C# exactly as you wrote it in 2003...if you want to. But I'm not sure why one would forgo the improved terseness of modern C#.

Next big language addition will be discriminated unions and even that is really "opt-in" if you want to use it.

by hirvi747 hours ago|

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> Next big language addition will be discriminated unions and even that is really "opt-in" if you want to use it.

I was excited for DU until I saw the most recent implementation reveal.

https://github.com/dotnet/csharplang/blob/main/proposals/uni...

Compared to the beauty of Swift:

https://docs.swift.org/swift-book/documentation/the-swift-pr...

by CharlieDigital7 hours ago|

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The C# impl is still early and I think what will end up happening is that a lot of the boilerplate will end up being owned by source generators in the long term. C# team has a habit of "make it work, make it better". Whatever v1 gets released is some base capability that v2+ will end up making more terse. I'm happy and OK with that; I'd rather have ugly unions than no unions (yes, I already use OneOf)

by pjmlp3 hours ago|

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Ah Source Generators, after all these years still badly documented, when searching you most likely will find the original implemenation meanwhile deprecated, have poor tooling with string concatenation, and only have a few great blog posts from .NET MVPs to rely on.

by CharlieDigital2 hours ago|

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:shrug: we're using them very effectively and there are plenty of resources at this point.

Very useful for reducing boilerplate and we can do some interesting things with it. One use case: we generate strongly typed "LLM command" classes from prompt strings.

by pjmlp2 hours ago|

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There are plenty of resources, outside Microsoft Learn that is, and the content is mostly understandable by those of us that have either watched conference talks, or podcasts on the matter.

Now having someone diving today into incremental code generators, with the best practices not to slow down Visual Studio during editing, that is a different matter.

They are naturally useful, as a user, as a provider, Microsoft could certainly improve the experience.