[rixtox]

If you feel that TypeScript, or hell even JavaScript, is becoming more alike C#, it's actually deliberately done by Microsoft in benefiting their ecosystem. In this interview they mentioned they had internal demands to convert/transpile C# into JavaScript or TypeScript. So by making these target languages more like C#, it directly benefits their need. But I don't think this should be the driving force in designing ECMAScript. When they are pushing a language feature, they have an unspoken internal goal, and every choice they make is to make JS/TS look more like C#, and they are more likely to dismiss proposals that preventing them from deliverying that goal. There's likely a bit of conflict of interest there.

[oaiey]

As a long term observer: definitely not a goal. But you have to be clear here: JavaScript and C# both are OO languages, both are having origins stories in Java/C++, both are facing the same niche (system development), same challenges (processor counts, ...) and so on. And then, you put teams on it which look left and right when they face a problem and then you wonder that they reuse what they like?

C# language team is also really good. They did not do a lot of mistakes in the 25+ years. They are a very valid source of OO and OO-hybrid concepts. It is not only TS/JS but also Java and C++ who often look to C#.

The story was not to transform C# code to JS but to use C# to write the code in the first place and transpile it. Not for the sake of having .NET usage but for the sake of having a good IDE.

[m132]

> They did not do a lot of mistakes in the 25+ years

If my memory serves, .NET and WinFS were the two major forces that sunk Longhorn, and both have been given their walking papers after the reset [1].

.NET and C# have grown to be mature and well-engineered projects, but the road there was certainly not without bumps. It's just that a lot of the bad parts haven't spilled outside of Microsoft, thankfully.

[1] https://www.theregister.com/2005/05/26/dotnet_longhorn/

[Sammi]

Are we mixing the language and the runtime here? C# the language seems weirdly free of weirdness and footguns.

[jayd16]

Not only that, they went as deep as mixing in project issues with language design. A massive rewrite mixed with massive feature changes is always a tricky thing no matter the language.

[moron4hire]

.NET was already a going concern before Longhorn even started. What sank Longhorn was the fact that writing an OS from scratch is hard and maintaining compatibility with existing OSes in the process is even harder, especially when you're adopting a completely new architecture. Longhorn would have been a microkernel running 100% on the .NET runtime, mainline Windows is a monolithic kernel written in C++. I don't know how it would have ever worked, whether .NET was "perfect" or not.

[senderista]

No, Longhorn was neither a microkernel nor was the kernel rewritten in .NET.

Source: I was there.

[oaiey]

I think he confuses longhorn with Singularity research project.

[pjmlp]

See Android, or Meadows for alternative reality.

[moron4hire]

Android still runs on a monolithic kernel written in a memory-unsafe language. I'm finding it suprisingly difficult to find information on Meadow, other than it runs .NET DLLs as user-space applications, but nothing about the structure of the kernel.

Longhorn was going to be more than that. Microsoft did have Singularity/Midori projects, started around the middle of Longhorn/Vista, and continued much longer after Vista released to build out the managed microkernel concept. It's been about a decade since they've put any work into it, though.

[pjmlp]

Microsoft wasn't even able to deliver that, which was my whole point.

Joe Duffy mentions on a talk, that even with Midori running production workloads, Windows team could not be changed their mind.

Meadow uses a C++ based microkernel, the whole userspace is based on .NET, by the way.

[oaiey]

The article is presenting some stuff mixed up. Had nothing to do with the language or the framework. WinFS was a database product. Over engineered and abstract.

.NET and C# were researched a lot for operating system usage (Midori, Singularity) but that was after Longhorn.

The operating system group UI toolkits was a further problem and they pivoted there dozen of times in the years. Particular for a C++ based os group.

But the death of longhorn was ultimately about the security restart of Bill Gates

[pjmlp]

Nope, what sunk Longhorn was politics.

Windows team is a C++ kingdom, and those devs will not adopt .NET even at gun point.

They redid Longhorn with COM and called it WinRT, irony of ironies, WinRT applications run slower than .NET with COM reference counting all over the place.

Google has showed those folks what happens when everyone plays on the same team, and now it owns the mobile phone market, a managed userspace with 70% world market.

[pmkary]

Not at all. Before the use of TypeScript exploded, they had two features brought into it from C# which were namespaces and enums (both of which are amazingly good features. For the first one, no one knew what was the right choice back then. We had almost a dozen different module systems and TypeScript had gone their way to support all of them and namespaces were their own solution to the mess (remember they were trying to solve their own problems at first, it wasn't to dominate anything). I personally used namespaces and I could have only the TypeScript compiler running and producing a single JS file for rapid development without the burden of --- then very slow --- webpack.

And for enums, using strings as enums was not a very efficient idea. I think JavaScript introduced Symbols for locked/hidden properties but also meant to use them as enums. It never worked either and then the sum type, union type feature of TypeScript made the whole community to keep using strings as enums. This is still a very bad idea, it is not ergonomic, it is prone to many problems, and very inefficient to compare strings instead of integers. But hey TypeScript tried to fix the problem and almost everyone rejected it. And so enum is now discontinued.

Rest of the changes to TypeScript came from almost any other language but C#, probably the biggest changes ever to happen to JavaScript came directly from CoffeeScript. And then I personally saw how each of these new changes --- one by one --- arrived at C#. For what I have seen firsthand by reading the TC39 proposals, each feature came from a different community and different programming languages, (think about null operators !/?, the nullish coalescing ??, the incoming pipes, fat arrows and lambdas, mixings) as JavaScript is the only language everyone has to use, and it has benefited everyone to have a language that has all the great things from all other languages.

[steve1977]

Well, for one, benefiting Microsoft's ecosystem does not imply being detrimental to other ecosystems per se.

Furthermore, couldn't the convergence of TypeScript towards C# be simply a result of shared goals and values of the two languages, especially considering they have the same principal designer?

[tester756]

It sounds like conspiracy theory that they design TS/JS to convert from C# easier, huh.

The truth is that C# is probably the best designed mainstream language out there.

C# was known as a language with lowest amount of WTF per LoC

[epolanski]

C# is inherently OOP oriented and it's type system works completely differently.

[froh]

that's the "evil MS" perspective

The sequence of turbo pascal / delphi / c# / typescript which brought us LSP as a sidekick (!) IMHO has benefitted the whole industry at least as much as "transpile c# to ecma script via typescript" . no. much much much more.

I do not see a problem with MS also having an internal use case .

you know I wouldn't stop using python "because" Guido now works at MS ...

[ptx]

Python has an elected steering council and core team. The governance process explicitly tries to avoid conflict of interest by disallowing more than two steering council members working for the same employer. See PEP 13 [1].

By contrast, .NET is controlled by Microsoft (with veto over board decisions [2] and code changes [3]), integrates Microsoft's telemetry to send your data to Microsoft by default [4] and deliberately hobbles features to benefit Microsoft [5].

[1] https://peps.python.org/pep-0013/

[2] https://dotnetfoundation.org/about/policies/.net-foundation-...

[3] https://github.com/dotnet/runtime/blob/main/CONTRIBUTING.md

[4] https://github.com/dotnet/sdk/issues/6145

[5] https://github.com/dotnet/sdk/issues/22247

[no_wizard]

According to the docs, .NET 10 has hot reload via the cli, unless I'm misunderstanding something: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/core/tools/dotnet-w...

[WorldMaker]

The complaint above was that JS was becoming too much like C#, so the steering committee of .NET isn't the one of the original concern. (Also, as pointed out, that "deliberate hobbling" case was litigated in the public square on HN at the time and then revised and "unhobbled" after the outcry.)

As far as the other direction, JS has a somewhat similar (but rather more complex) situation to Python with its steering committee being Ecma International's TC39 (Technical Committee 39).

Ecma International has similar By-Laws and Rules designed to manage conflict of interest and too much power consolidate in a single employer of committee members. Ecma is maybe even a little "stricter" than Python because its rules consider the companies themselves to be the members, and companies only get one vote no matter how many employees interact with the process.

https://ecma-international.org/policies/by-laws/

https://ecma-international.org/policies/rules/

[oaiey]

Spot on.