Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by int_19h 1465 days ago
I would argue that, as far as popularizing sequence comprehensions goes, C# (LINQ) was probably more influential than Python.
2 comments
blagie 1465 days ago
Hejlsberg is a genius.

Before C#, he designed Delphi, which was a pleasure to use. It made Pascal beautiful, which is not something many considered possible. Functionally, Delphi combined the ease-of-use of VisualBASIC with the power of C++, with an elegance unparalleled in any environment before.

He did Turbo Pascal. It's hard to overstate how much of a revolution that was. Compile-wait-wait-wait-run turned into run.

Now, he's doing TypeScript.

I'm not sure it's really fair to compare anyone to Hejlsberg.

"Sure, your kid won a Nobel Prize for his research, but Einstein did relativity...." "Sure, your business hit a billion dollars, but it's no Apple...."

Acknowledging brilliance elsewhere doesn't reduce my appreciation of Python. It's a good language.

link
xigoi 1465 days ago
LINQ weirdly renamed basic FP concepts. Why is the map operation called “Select”? If anything, I'd expect the filter operation to be called that.
link
tsimionescu 1465 days ago
It's SQL inspired language, because SQL is far and away more well known, and understandable, than functional programming.

And that is one reason why LINQ is still one of the only functional collections APIs that exposes GroupBy, which is an extremely useful operation.

Edit: correction, LINQ is no longer the only one that introduced GroupBy, but it was probably the first.

link