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:How and Why C# Was Made

[atlasheavy]

Microsoft starts trying to tell people that "OO is soo... yeasterday. You want Indigo."

You're referring to Don Box, specifically, right? I don't think it's so much that Don is pooh-pooh'ing OOP in general, it's that he feels that a service-oriented architecture is better suited to the kind of problems we face today than DCOM or CORBA. His point is that trying to use an OOP metaphor for enormous, architecturally sound remote object invocation/data transfer systems is a terribly complex task.

Also, keep in mind that Don wrote *the* book on Microsoft's COM technology; OOP has its place, but CORBA and DCOM are not really the place.

Re:does c# matter to any one

[Sabalon]

C# may not be that great compared to C++ or Java. But what .net provides is pretty nice.

My officemate wrote a function in vb.net on a Windows box, running via ASP.NET/IIS/Win2k. I wrote a small little C# program on my Linux box that calls the procedure on the windows box. It looks something like this:
result=addup(2,5);
with 7 being put in result. Nice and simple. Could have easily been something to add a user to a box...or I could reimplement the same function on my Linux box to add a user there and he could call it from an vb script.

It does a great job of providing cross platform calls without adding tons of overhead or a lengthy API...the libraries do all the setup/teardown instead of the programmer, and it is a lot cleaner than parsing html output.

It may not be perfect, but I'm just sporting a woody because I finally somewhat understand what the hell the nebulous .net is partially supposed to be...all thanks to Mono.

Wake up and smell the marketing bullshit!

[Anonymous Coward]

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).

For fucks sake, man! Wake up and smell the marketing bullshit. The most innovative impressive thing about Java was that it was successfully marketed as basically the second coming (more tangibly as the solution to 10 different huge problems), all while just being another platform. Get it? They created their own platform without hardware leverage, OS leverage, app leverage, etc. It's bootstrapping by marketing.

Re:Why do big companies want pseudo-compiled langs

[prockcore]

1) Pseudo-compiled languages are easily decompiled.

Um, compiled languages are easily decompiled as well.
http://hte.sf.net is a badass hexeditor/disassembler.

Case in point, I walked through the assembly of iTunes to figure out the AES key that iTunes uses for iTMS. And iTunes was written in C++.