The One Computer Language Without Complaint
In a blog post titled, Tell Us Why Your Language Sucks, David MacIver has many commenters list which languages they have used and hated.
Interesting to note that the one language that does not (yet) have a complaint is C#.
Well, except for this tongue-in-cheek comment:
i hate microsoft. i hate them for making something like the CLR which is actually half-decent. i hate that they can get some respect when they’re obviously so evil and all… I hate that they’re actually getting smart people to put thought into things instead of relying on monopolistic bullying… they should be more evil and do more wrong things so I can hate them more.
I’m personally a big fan of C#. I love the fact that I can write both web and desktop applications using the same language. And the language is just so perfectly logical.
Before this, I tried several others. Ruby on Rails kept changing and had little documentation. PHP was just too hard to memorize. I remember someone once describing it as a bunch of macros more than a language.
That being said, these other languages have created some of the largest websites in the world, so all are capable. And some of the ‘old school’ programmers hate the abstraction layer of C#.
Make sure you spend time doing your homework before choosing a language.
Of course, an alternative theory is that what stopped C# from getting comments was the clause “It specifically has to be a language you use at least semi-regularly and like”
Haha, true. I have a theory that some hard-core programmers don’t like C# because to some extent the ease-of-use commoditizes the art of programming, but only at the fringes.
For what it’s worth, I don’t use C# much but find it to be a relatively pleasant language, but that its infrastructure and ecosystem are particularly annoying and its effectively windows-only nature makes it basically useless to me (I’m aware of mono, but find it to be a bit worst-of-all-worlds).
Also given the huge pile of features in C# 3, I don’t think it can be accused of an excessive ease of use.
great to see u in this conversation – i just crammed Objective C so i could get a sense of iPhone programming and leave the back door open for desktop apps and who knows what else Apple has up their sleeve.
based on your comments, I will def look at a C# book the next i hit the library or bookstore!
btw – did u toss Java/Javascript out the door?
I’m definitely shopping for languages that simplify UI programming…
Personally I don’t think C# is a good language for web applications. As much as people bag PHP, its what the big websites use to scale – the best developers I know work in PHP and Python (some in ROR).
@Anthony Feint
MySpace, Plenty of Fish, and Dell use ASP.NET (which implies either C# or VB.NET). If I ever have a web site that even needs to scale that well, I’ll be more than happy
@Chinarut
I use Javascript. Client-side script lets you do a lot of cool stuff like Ajax. I’ve never looked into Java.
@Anthony Feint
One thing that makes me jealous of PHP is the ease in writing Facebook applications since it’s the native language of FB. I stopped trying to make one using C# awhile ago.