How C# Was Made

prostoalex writes "Bruce Eckel (from the Thinking in C++/Java/Patterns/Enterprise Java fame) and Bill Venners have interviewed programming legend Anders Hejlsberg. After 13 years in Borland and joining Microsoft in 1996, Hejlsberg now leads the development of C# language and talks about the development process, reasons some things exist in C# and some not, as well as future directions."

Comments

Re:"Co-opt Java"

[tjmsquared]

I don't know why Java developers always feel the need to point out that C# took a lot of ideas from Java. I don't see C++ developers always pointing out that Java's mandate was to "co-opt" C++. Of course C# took a lot of ideas from Java (I don't think Microsoft has ever denied this), because Java got a lot of things right. C# also made a lot of improvements (event handling is MUCH improved in C# for example) and is a great language to program in. I think it would be even better if there were a .NET runtime for an OS other than Windows, but the good people on the Mono project are working on that already.

Sun Should Embrace and Extend

[gurustu]

It's very easy for Java devs (and I'm one) to sneer at C# as just another MS ploy to lure people away from quality, but I think that there's no question that C# has some language features that should be migrated into Java.

It's well known that the C# designers paid a lot of attention to Java, but more importantly, it's also quite clear that they also spent a lot of time paying attention to the experience of developing in Java.

So while I might not entirely agree with the uncaught exceptions or the way methods aren't virtual by default, I do think it would be a good idea for Sun to take the lesson from MS, and take what is best about C# and move it into Java.

Re:Sun Should Embrace and Extend

[gurustu]

I've been following the 1.5 release pretty closely for a while now, and it has some excellent additions. I'm especially pleased with the generics, the enumerated constants, the ability to define a method as accepting an undefined number of parameters, and the improved monitoring. The amount of code I'll be able to remove from my codebase will be large.

However, that doesn't invalidate what I said initially. 1.5 isn't a response to C# (well, maybe the enumerated types are), but seems to be kind of orthogonal to C#. It is a distinct improvement to the language, but that isn't the same thing as "embrace and extend". Those improvements don't give Java evangelists the ability to say "The C# language has no good feature that Java doesn't."

I'm also making an argument about intellectual honesty. Java (like any other piece of software) will never flower into its full potential unless the people who believe in it are willing to acknowledge the strengths of its competitors, and then adopt those strengths where it can.

It isn't a sign of weakness to do that, but a sign of strength.

Re:"Co-opt Java"

[tealover]

In a sense, Java was designed to co-opt C++. But co-optinging C++ was not made as a business decision to lock in Sun customers, it was made as part of Sun's vision of "The Net is the Computer" (or whatever they called it).

Sun embraced the internet years before Microsoft and looked out into the future and realized that desktop computing and huge, standalone applications were going to be increasingly replaced by device computing and small, internet downloadable applications would be prevalant.

To that end, they tried to design a language that was simple, that had built-in libraries to handle basic internet protocols and to a large extent, their vision was spot-on and Java was hugely successful.

Without Microsoft spending years trying to undercut them it's very conceivable that Java would be the lingua-franca of the internet right now.

Re:"Co-opt Java"

[yomegaman]

What are you talking about? Nobody uses java for "internet downloadable applications", or even intranet downloadable ones. Their vision of thin-client computing was shown to be a pipe dream, to everyone except you anyway.

Re:"Co-opt Java"

[kyz]

Java was designed to co-opt Smalltalk, or at least Sun brand it and bring it up to date.

Think about it... Smalltalk's main points were the single root object heirarchy, the bytecode compilation, and the large runtime library including full GUI. Did C++ have this? No. It was more "object oriented concepts ported to C" - lean and mean, machine dependant and no standard GUI. The C++ generics and the STL weren't standard when Java arrived.