Not attacking you opinion at all but I'm a little shocked that someone would have this opinion, I work at a Java shop (using java 8 but I'm mostly now on the node.js side). Java 8 really doesn't have any features that are better than C#'s. Java 8 is missing some pretty major ones, like type inference, automatic getters/setters, LINQ, function passing support that's not brain dead, and a number of of things that make dev life SO much better.
While I prefer C#'s delegates/lambdas, there has been an occasional time I've wished for the ability to construct a full instanced object in that case - Java's anonymous inner classes are brilliant at this.
Likewise Java's OOP enums (basically singletons) are something I miss too.
That's a few small features I notice missing when I switch to C#.
Plus, in general I find there's a difference in style. C# libraries tend to be more pragmatic, following on Microsoft's heavy use of reflection and stringly-typed stuff. Not much OOP navel-gazing.
Java, on the other hand, celebrates OOP to a ludicrous extreme.
Also on the community, C# has been working very hard to develop the kind of bazaar that Java has, but they're coming from far behind on that front - far more C# developers restrict them to the first-party tools compared to the Java ones.
Maven, Ant, and Gradle are also in a class of their own. They help making building Java apps universally extremely easy. C# has an annoying amount of complexity in this area, with a lot of things being built into Visual Studio, and therefore Windows only. “Visual Studio” isn’t a fun build system if you’re not on Windows. And compiling people’s libraries from random repositories over github, bitbucket, etc., only to find that it won’t compile because it relies on some old version of a library that you can’t find online and the newer versions aren’t compatible.
Nuget solves the dependency issue. MSBuild has switching from part of the framework to VS to framework to open source. On other platforms there was always csc to compile programs (which is dramatically faster), something missing from the new dotnetcore.
There was also nant and a number of build tools, plus good old make.
Ms is working on this, but it's been slowed by politics. There was an alternative msbuild file called json.project that was happening, but it's since been deprecated in favour of strippinh down the old . csproj format to its bare minimum and cleaning it up for sanity.
Given the velocity of adding new features in C# these days, these will come sooner rather than later (indeed, some basic pattern matching is already in C# 7).
TBH c# is not enough of an advantage to do a huge migration to the language from java. Something like kotlin (still jvm) or swift (no gc) makes a lot more sense.
Or Kotlin but that's not his argument. He's arguing for Java 8. I don't agree that Java 8 is really an acceptable modern language for development. IMO it's painful and god awful slow develop in compared to a host of better languages (Swift, Scala, Groovy, and C# all included but not limited to).
> develop in compared to a host of better languages (Swift, Scala, Groovy, and C# all included
Swift, Scala, and C# are statically-typed languages, like Java, whereas Apache Groovy is dynamically-typed originally -- though static typing was added in Groovy 2, virtually no-one uses it. Dynamically typed languages like Groovy are good for glue code, build scripts, and testing, not for developing actual systems.
The ecosystem is an important factor too. I'm excited to use C# in new projects, but I can't move away from Java without replacements for all of the libraries of external code that I use.
I also think Java is fine. Compared to C#, I find Java code easier to read as there is less magic. I also use Groovy for some corner cases like for example JDBC stuff or metaprogramming. I'm also a big fan of Maven and the development tools for Java, and most importantly the eco-system with rich libraries and frameworks. Is there an alternative for JRebel or Spring-loaded for C# yet?
When I started going into C# from Java a bit, there were two things slightly annoying me:
- Class extensions: I saw code examples online that just wouldn't work for me because the compiler told me a certain method of a built-in class wouldn't exist. After I while I found out that the author of that snippet had used class extensions and not bothered to mention.
- The var keyword: While this is sometimes nice for quick scripting or hacking in the debugger console, it opens the door for hard-to-read code.
Those are not necessarily "magic", but potential obscurities that can't happen in Java, simply because Java lacks these features.
> The var keyword: While this is sometimes nice for quick scripting or hacking in the debugger console, it opens the door for hard-to-read code.
I find type inference to be the opposite, generally, because it encourages good naming, and it reduces noise/boilerplate. It also makes writing and refactoring faster (don't have to think about the return types, just the code flow).
The only situation I can even think of where it is a problem is when you are passing something to an overloaded method. For example:
void DoSomething(MySpecialType value);
void DoSomething(string value);
////
var result = GetData();
DoSomething(result);
You can't tell which one is going to be called by just looking at that code. However:
* GetData() is probably badly named in this situation
* If DoSomething() does something very different depending on the type passed, it should have different names, not be overloaded
On top of that, this code can also have the same problem without type inference:
> It also makes writing and refactoring faster (don't have to think about the return types, just the code flow).
I see what you mean, but isn't this one of the advantages of explicitly declaring types? If you refactor a method to return a different (incompatible) type, you'll have to touch all affected code parts, possibly revealing uninteded consequences of the change.
Also, I think remembering that autocompletion in VS had some trouble with correct type inference in some cases. But it's been a couple of years, maybe things are different now.
If you change the return type of a method without using var you would still have the exact same problems. That's not an actual problem.
I've used var since it came out years ago and never had this autocompletion problem you talk about.
You sometimes had to explicitly declare a type in foreach loops, but that had more to do with shitty legacy APIs that used abstract classes as return types. Wasn't really var's fault though.
> If you refactor a method to return a different (incompatible) type, you'll have to touch all affected code parts, possibly revealing uninteded consequences of the change.
If you can refactor your code such that you change the return type of a method such that it returns an object of a different type, which nonetheless implements all of the methods used by clients of your type that accept and return types which in turn accept and return types that line up with the expectations of their clients, etc, etc, without having to look at or touch any of those clients, and end up with something that happily compiles but gives an unexpected result, you need to have a long and hard look at how you're using the language's type system, and why it isn't encoding your assumptions in a sane way.
Your code shouldn't be compatible with a different type unless it makes sense for your code to be compatible with that type. That's what the type system is for.
Dictionary<string, Tuple<int, List<string>>> foo = new Dictionary<string, Tuple<int, List<string>>>();
Is prefferable to:
var foo = new Dictionary<string, Tuple<int, List<string>>>();
What do you get from the former that makes the eye-pain worth it?
Also, the var keyword is necessary for anonymous types if you want to hold a reference to one. And this is a language feature I sorely miss in Java-land.
Most developers use Windows, where VS Professional (under the badge of VS Community) is free. The set of developers who use Linux and OS X (and I mean, I am one) is not representative of developers of a whole.
> Class extensions: I saw code examples online that just wouldn't work for me because the compiler told me a certain method of a built-in class wouldn't exist.
One thing that VS can now do (as of VS 2015) is tell you where exactly the "missing" extension method is, and offer to add a corresponding `using` declaration for you.
Not sure if VSCode or VS/Mac support that, though. But they are all built on the same code analysis engine, so there's no reason why they couldn't.
I'm not saying it's a bad thing, I actually like both. It just takes more time to get up to speed and there is more surface of attack for devs to screw things up. That's also what I don't like e.g. about JS: It's so unrestrictive you can do a lot of wild things with it - which is sometimes good but often bad.
both of these are great tools, but as with many you have tradeoffs. Extension methods give you a way to produce very clean reusable code to extend behaviour of classes. Downside is you do need to bring in the extension method class (not a big deal).
Java is a shitty language exactly because they don't put in things like these out of fear that people don't know how to use them.
Java has default methods on interfaces instead. It's their take on the same issue, in a way. They considered the fact that with C#'s extension methods types not owned by the developer can be extended (as well as platform types) a problem and opted instead for a solution where someone who owns a type also controls its extensions. Default methods in Java are purely a way of adding stuff to interfaces in your API without breaking existing implementations (but also allowing future implementations to override those methods). C# on the other hand is merely a bit of syntactic sugar which can be confusing at times. (I have to admit not to be a fan of various libraries that add extension methods to integers and similar. It's not a good way of exposing an API in my eyes.)
TL;DR: Java has something similar, it just came from a different view of how the problem should be solved. Both approaches have advantages and drawbacks.
In my experience, C# can be coded almost exactly like Java 8; just ignore the extra features C# has. (I don't know why you would, but it's certainly possible.) Do you have more specific complaints?
Plumtree Portal / BEA Aqualogic Interaction / Oracle WebCenter documentation is/was a perfect example of this. When I was working on it, all of their code samples had a footnote that said something like "all code examples work in Java or C# unless otherwise noted". I don't recall ever coming across a language specific example.
Why would someone down vote an opinion that they are okay with Java? It added to the conversation. Personally I prefer C# and Swift to Java but others idea are just as valid.
Imho people are just expressing their disagreement. I know downvote is not meant for that, but I think HN is to blame here. If you have two arrows, one up and one down, why is up for agreement while down is not for disagreement, but for "this doesn't add to conversation"? The actions should be opposite, or they should use different icons.
The implication is "I have no interest in this because I'm happy with what I have". Okay, that's fine, please enjoy your Java and build wonderful things. Oh, BTW, why are you typing into a reply box on a thread you have no interest in? And the implication there is because your tool is a poopy head and I wanted to subtly point that out by expressing my lack of interest.
So, yeah, go away because that's not contributing to the conversation.
> So, yeah, go away because that's not contributing to the conversation.
Well, maybe there’s another implication.
Google switching to C# would lead to them neglecting and deprecating the Java ecosystem on Android. That’s gonna be real ugly for app devs, ending up having to rewrite everything.
So, maybe, there is a real contribution in the comment, which you just haven’t seen yet?
Yet, that’s what’d happen. Google hasn’t even managed to support C++ alongside of Java as first class citizen, adding yet another one would make the situation even worse.
> Why would someone down vote an opinion that they are okay with Java?
Paul Graham once said [1]:
I think it's ok to use the up and down
arrows to express agreement. Obviously
the uparrows aren't only for applauding
politeness, so it seems reasonable that
the downarrows aren't only for booing
rudeness.
It only becomes abuse when people resort
to karma bombing: downvoting a lot of
comments by one user without reading
them in order to subtract maximum karma.
Fortunately we now have several levels
of software to protect against that.
Many have taken this to mean that down voting a comment when they disagree with the opinion therein, no matter how well it argues that opinion and no matter how much it contributes to the conversation, is fine.
This is the number one reason why I looked for a different place and was hoping lobst.er would have taken off.
The down vote causes the comment to be dimmed and seen as a rejection to the comment. It is very frustrating when the top right side is your name and your "Hacker News Points" so I don't get why the down vote if you disagree. A down vote kills the conversation.
A useful opinion is the result of some thought process and set of inputs. By not explaining that thought process or its set of inputs, it is impossible for others to validate whether an opinion is reasonable and/or useful.
C# and java are very similar except C# has a bunch of extra features. Instead of creating anonymous classes and overriding methods you use event handlers. Plus you have linq,lambdas, operator overloading etc.
> Operator overloading is probably the worst feature ever invented, same with Class Extensions, reducing readability of code
or greatly enhancing it. Depending on how you use it.
That's why Java is a language for idiots. I'm not saying everyone who uses it or likes it is an idiot, it's a reasonable language to like. I'm saying it's designed to be usable by idiots. Can't have operator overloading, it might be abused. Can't have unsigned types, no one ever should use those. etc...
Every language is usable by idiots and some are even copied by idiots (C#). The constant security problems we face today were all created by idiots that didn't fully understand the language and the implications of what they were doing.
There are reasonable applications for goto. But I think there are more reasonable applications for operator overloading. (like Complex, BigInteger, or dimensional types)
Class extensions can be fantastic and really enable design elements in elegant ways, any advanced feature could be argued that it reduces readability if used poorly.
Yeah, I was thinking about that when I wrote the comment. They were most useful for `Observable` objects for event handling in swing; you don't really need that with C# events.
There are still uses though. Lambdas are the future, but there are lots of OO-first libraries that are still quite popular. It'd be nice to create e.g. `new Newtonsoft.JsonConverter() { ReadJson() {...} WriteJson() {...}}` etc on the fly sometimes without needing separate classes.
It's possible in F# though, so nothing dotnet specific is preventing it.