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C# 2.0 Spec Released
An anonymous reader writes "Microsoft released the design specifications document for C# 2.0 (codenamed 'Whidbey') to be released early next year. New features of the language include generics similar to those found in Eiffel and Ada, anonymous methods similar to lambda functions in Lisp, iterators, and partial types."
C# is ECMA standardized. Java is wholly owned by Sun. Sun has repeatedly balked at standardizing Java due to the inherent loss of control.
Perhaps there are potential submarine patents, but Java is absolutely vendor-tied while C# is at least relatively open.
No, but consider the competition. C++ is insanely complicated and broken, and is popular. Perl is insanely broken and complicated, and it is popular.
Anyway, anonymous higher order functions and generics are two really glaring deficiencies in Java, C#, and many other modern OO languages, so adding them is a step in the right direction. It's not as if these are minor, useless features.
> Is this their plan to "lock in" universities to teaching microsoft programing to all levels, because it will take
> 4 years of classes just to cover it all?
That's crazy. Universities don't teach programming languages except as tools to teach more important concepts.
college computer science people *are* learning it
What colleges are teaching C#? At my school we had one Pascal course then went into C followed by C++. I believe we could have taken Assembly right after Pascal, but I'll take that after I finish C++. I've heard of other schools starting with java or even python. I'm not arguing that schools don't teach C#, I just want to know which ones do so I can be sure not to transfer there.
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Personally, a "broken" language is a language that requires so much work to do things right that programmers that use them frequently do things wrong. For example, my all time favorite security flaw: the buffer overflow.
A good language should support the development of code that doesn't contain common flaws. In my opinion, C and C++ are directly responsible for security flaws that cost trillions.
Universities are right to teach important concepts (and not just algorithms like bubble-sort -- that's friggin freshmen stuff anyway) like software engineering, project managment, relational algebra (i.e. database stuff), networking, AI, parsing, logic, circuit design, and (I'm lumping here) under-the-hood operating system concepts.
If you've got a Computer Science degree, and you payed attention, you can pick up the syntax for a new language within an hour. With a good API reference, you can be banging out code like an old pro with a weekend of study. It's not that hard.
What matters far more than how well you know a language is how well you know how to program. Any monkey with a keyboard can whip out a Visual Basic app.
But to write truly masterful code... that transcends skill with a language and approaches art.
That said, I'm going to contradict myself: it's important to know the basic capabilities of the language you're working with. Java would be a shitty language to write, say, a program that computes the sum of the two numbers input to it on the command line, because it takes so long for the VM to load -- far more than the actual execution time of the program.
Fortunately, things like that can be quickly learned.
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