[NanoCoaster]

Absolutely agree. Modern C# language design feels very much lacking in vision or direction. It's mostly a bunch of shiny-looking language features being bolted on, all in ways that make the language massively more complex.

Just look at this feature: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/csharp/whats-new/cs...

Was this needed? Was this necessary? It's reusing an existing keyword, fine. It's not hard to understand. But it adds a new syntax to a language that's already filled to the brim, just to save a few keystrokes?

Try teaching someone C# nowadays. Completely impossible. Really, I wish they would've given F# just a tenth of the love that C# got over the years. It has issues but it could've been so much more.

[LunicLynx]

You are looking at it from what you know about C#, the goal is how can you reduce (delete) all this to make the language more accessible.

For you it may be fine to write:

List<string> strs = new List<string>();

And sure if you have been using C# for years you know all the things going on here.

But it shouldn’t be an argument that:

List<string> strs = [];

Is substentionally easier to grasp.

And that has been the theme of all changes.

The example you point out is the advanced case, someone only needs in a very specific case. It does not have a lot todo with learning the language.

The language design team is really making sure that the features work well throughout and I think that does deserve some credit.

[NanoCoaster]

I'm 100% on board with the [] syntax. I'm not on board with adding the syntax for passing arguments to the constructor within that syntax.

I agree that = [] is perfectly fine syntax. But I would definitely argue that:

[with(capacity: values.Length * 2), ..

is non-intuitive and unnecessary. What other language is there that has this syntax? Alternatively, is this a natural way of writing this? I wouldn't say so.

My main language in my free time is Rust, a few years ago it was F#. So, I'm absolutely open to other syntax ideas. But I feel that there has to be a direction, things have to work together to make a language feel coherent.

Another example would be Clojure, which I started learning a few months ago (before we all got swept up in AI FOMO :D). Clojure as a language feels very coherent, very logical. I'm still a beginner, but every time I learn something about it, it just makes sense. It feels as if I could have guessed that it works this way. I don't get that feeling at all in many of the new features of C#.

> The example you point out is the advanced case, someone only needs in a very specific case. It does not have a lot todo with learning the language.

I disagree. When learning the language, you're going to have to read other people's code and understand it. It's the same basic principle, but, I'd argue, much worse in C++. Yes, in theory, you don't have to understand SFINAE and template metaprogramming and (now) concepts and all those things. You could just work in a subset of C++ that doesn't use those things. But in practice, you're always going to have issues if you don't.

[Metasyntactic]

Hi there. Designer of this feature :D

> is non-intuitive and unnecessary.

intuitive is definitely in the eye of the beholder. When people saw:

`HashSet<string> people = [with(StringComparer.CaseInsensitiveComparer), .. group1, group2]`

they found it understandable. And this was also much nicer than what they'd have to write today (which would bring them out of the nice declarative collection-expression space).

Does that make it 'necessary'? Ultimately that's up to the individual. We felt like it was. Not being able to do simple things like this felt like a 'bitter pill'. Customization of collection construction is common (looking in codebases, it shows up about 7% of the time). So having to 'fall out' from the uniform collection-expr system into the much more verbose and clunky forms just for this common enough case felt 'necessary' to us.

>But I feel that there has to be a direction, things have to work together to make a language feel coherent.

I feel like this is conflicting feedback. Collection expressions made the language more coherent. Instead of 7 different ways of doing things (some of which were genuinely not efficient), we gave one uniform way of doing it. That makes things more coherent. Making it so you don't have to drop out of that for something as simple as configuring the collection makes things more coherent.

[grandpoobah]

As someone who has been coding C# since the pre-generics days, this is the first syntax change which I strongly disagree with. I pretty much love every little bit of syntactic sugar you guys have added to the language. But this? This seems objectively illogical and just straight up ugly. It blows my mind that this is making it into the language, and it makes me worry about the future of C#.

[Metasyntactic]

How do you define "objectively illogical" here?

[LunicLynx]

Just guessing here: Putting something at index 0 that has nothing to do with the content.

I tend to agree, but I also didn’t try it.

I also think the 7% number is wrong. 0.5% seems more realistic. It’s just that you are not able to see the majority of the code. Not everything is checked in or on GitHub.

[pjmlp]

I equate this language addition to the same mistake that !! was going to be a few years ago, until it got all that discussion threads on Twitter.

C# doesn't need to have syntax sugar for every possible use case.

Some of the more recent features feel like the outcome of the team pressure to have new language features to announce in November every year.

[Metasyntactic]

There isn't any such pressure. These features only happen because someone goes out of their normal job space to push for the necessity for them. All of the design team have full time work on other things. The design and impl only happens if the whole team can be convinced that it is important and worth investing in. Note that a lot of that convincing goes from the tons of feedback we get everywhere. This is anywhere from github, to partners (first, second, third), to conferences, forums, hacker news etc. etc. etc. We have tons coming in constantly. We pick these items up and spend this time on it precisely because we've seen the problems, and how it is affecting the ecosystem, and our future goals there, and we think it is then worthwhile.

I understand you feel this is ilke `!!`. We do not. We think being able to amke a dictionary, and pass in a custom comparer is deeply important. Analyzing code out there, we find that this happens in anywhere from 5-10% of all dicts. That is a ton of codebases and users impacted, and we've already heard from many of them about the friction this causes. Simply discarding that group greatly undercuts one of the core value props that collection expressions brings. A uniform and simple syntax that should suffice for nearly all collection needs.

You may feel differently. That's life in the design world :)

[pjmlp]

Well, your employers are the opinion language sugar doesn't matter in the CoPilot agentic world, so there is that.

As such my opinion remains that in such context saving keystrokes isn't that high priority, when agents do the actual work.

Thanks for replying, though.

[electroly]

Practically speaking, I've found that Claude never uses collection expressions, so the feature has disappeared from my code. Before AI, the feature was looked at with skepticism by my coworkers. We like writing "var" for all variable declarations. You have to write the type on the left side if you want to declare a variable with a collection expression, and we would never do that otherwise. Can't do `foreach (var x in [1, 2, 3])`. Too often, you have to make specific accommodations in your code to allow the collection expression to be valid.

Collection expressions today are more the sort of thing that a code poet or golfer can do to prettify their code than something a newbie can count on using. It's tough to explain "you can only use this when the collection type is implied in that spot" to a newbie. The value of the base feature is still unproven for me. I'm not sure I agree, without some convincing, that collection expressions made the language more coherent rather than doing https://xkcd.com/927.

[NanoCoaster]

Hi, thanks for answering :)

> Collection expressions made the language more coherent. Instead of 7 different ways of doing things (some of which were genuinely not efficient), we gave one uniform way of doing it.

I see your point on this. My dislike comes from a mixture of "I don't like how it looks" and "this language already has tons of features".

In terms of looks, I wish it could be more coherent with existing syntax.

List<int> = new {1, 2, 3} and List<int> = {1, 2, 3} are obviously taken up by anonymous types and blocks themselves. Would something like

List<int> = new(capacity: 10)[1, 2, 3]

have been possible? It feels like a combination of target-typed new and the initialization syntax. It involves the "new" keyword, which everybody already associates with constructor calls. It's short. Obviously, I don't know if this even works, maybe there's a parsing issue there (aren't those the most annoying issues in language design haha).

> they found it understandable

Kind of in my experience. Me and the people I've shown this to can easily remember it, but we all agree that it doesn't look like obvious syntax to them. Those two things are quite different to me. Contrast this to something like target-typed new, which immediately made sense to the same people. One might argue that that's fine enough and maybe it is, but I think, the less I have to remember about a language's syntax, the better. I'm going to have to remember many many other things anyway, better keep my memory free for the details of SynchronizationContext and async flow :)

I'm obviously aware that you get tons of bikeshedding comments like this all the time, so I'm sure you've gone through this. But to me, this invented syntax would have been fine. I just don't like the one that actually got in.

Now, the necessity on the other hand: May just be the company I'm working at, but my personal experience has never been that this is a big issue. Sure, it's nice to not have to fall back to explicit initialization a few more times. But personally, this doesn't pass my threshold of "painful enough to warrant additional syntax".

That's the core of my issue: Most, maybe all, of the new features in the language are fine to me in isolation. I may bikeshed about the explicit syntax (see: this thread). But my main issue is that the sum of complexity in the language and the issues beginners have when learning it are steadily increasing. I see this all the time at work.

As you said, this is definitely subjective. And in the end, language design is a very subjective process and maybe C# just won't be for me in the long run. But I wish it would, because at its core I like it, and .NET, a lot. Which is why I will continue to speak for my (subjective) viewpoint.

Well, this turned into a bit of an incoherent rant. I appreciate you exposing yourself to the HN acid pit ;)

[Metasyntactic]

> Would something like `List<int> = new(capacity: 10)[1, 2, 3]` have been possible?

Great question. And our design docs, and discussion with the community cover this. The reason that was eliminated as an option (we considered several dozen possible syntaxes) was that this syntax was actively confusing and misleading for people (for several reasons). These include (in no particular order):

1. the use of 'new' indicating that a new value was being allocated. That's not necessarily the case with collection expressions. The compiler is free to be smart here and not allocate if it doesn't need to. `[1, 2, 3]` for example, being constants, can in some cases just point at a data segment in the program.

2. the use of 'new' indicating that a constructor is being called ('new' has always meant that). That's not necessarily the case with collection expressions. Many collection forms (interfaces, immutables, spans, etc) do not go through constructors. This was actively confusing for people.

3. That syntax is already legal. It's an implicit objet creation that is being indexed into.

4. There was strong feedback from many in the community (and the design group, and lots that we talked to) that having things outside the boundary of the `[ ... ]` syntax was actively confusing. One could not easily tell what hte collection was and what wasn't part of it. The idea is that the `[ ... ]` is "the actual value". You know where it starts, where it ends, and what it represents.

--

Of course, at the end of the day, absolutely none of this may sway you. That's why we have a design process and we go through so many options. There were dozens considered here and we had many axes we were trying to optimize for. Overal, this struck a balance of working nicely, and having no major problems going for it (unlike other options).

> I'm obviously aware that you get tons of bikeshedding comments like this all the time, so I'm sure you've gone through this.

Yup :) Totally ok with us though.

> But personally, this doesn't pass my threshold of "painful enough to warrant additional syntax".

Sure. But that's why we look at the entire ecosystem. And we converse with people who have full codebases they haven't been able to move over because of the lack of this. And we look at the pain that this will cause esp when we get dictionary/key/value support. All of this motivated what was ultimately a tiny feature that cost very little to get in. It was medium bang for very low buck.

And that's worth explaining too. We are always working on some huge features. But they take up a ton of time and need tons of effort and runway. Small features like this are easy to slot in in gaps and help deal with papercuts and friction that are often annoying people.

[HauntingPin]

Isn't this just another form of Python's list comprehensions?

https://docs.python.org/3/tutorial/datastructures.html#list-...

I'm also not sure that something not being intuitive or natural is necessarily a bad thing in of itself. You state it as if it's so, but you haven't demonstrated that this way of defining a list is worse. You also haven't made any attempt to understand any possible benefit, nor have you attempted any sort of analysis comparing the good and the bad aspects.

[NanoCoaster]

No, this is just a constructor call, it's purely syntax sugar for the new() way of doing it.

> I'm also not sure that something not being intuitive or natural is necessarily a bad thing in of itself. You state it as if it's so, but you haven't demonstrated that this way of defining a list is worse.

I would argue that a language having more features, without the feature being helpful, is a bad thing in itself. If the syntax isn't necessary or very convenient in many cases, it shouldn't exist. The syntax being natural (which, absolutely, is a very subjective thing) just makes it less of an issue, I'd say.

Every new syntax added to the language adds cognitive overhead to readers of code. But also, it adds possible interactions with other language features that may be added in the future. Now, the example I brought up doesn't really concern the second point, I'll concede that. But unions? That is a big concept to add to a language that already has decades of existing conventions and tons of other features. How will they interact with generics? Nullable reference types? And, just as importantly: How will they interact with any other features that might be added at some point that we don't even know about?

I'm not against adding syntax sugar. For example, I quite like primary constructors, which is another relatively new C# feature. I think it's a bit annoying that they were kind of added in a roundabout way, by first adding records and then adding primary constructors to classes, but this time they don't define properties but fields...but in the end, it's a nice convenience feature when using constructor injection. Which, whatever one may feel about this, is pretty common in C# code.

But the thing is: If every single feature that's nice for a few use cases gets added to a language, the language will explode. The best example for this is C++. C# is definitely not that bad, far from it, but my point is that I want it to stay that way :)

[xnorswap]

That's a basic example with a single level of generics too, you'd sometimes have to do things like:

    Dictionary<string, List<Tuple<string, string>>> foo = new Dictionary<string, List<Tuple<string, string>>> 

Or things like:

    Dictionary<string, List<Tuple<string, string>>> foo = DoSomeWork();

And you'd have to get the type right, even though the compiler knew the type, because it'd tell you off for getting it wrong. Sometimes it was easiest to just grab the type from the compiler error. ( This example is of course a bit OTT, and it's a bit of a code-smell to be exposing that detail of typing to consumers. )

No-one wants to go back to that, and anyone who says C# is over-complicated I think is forgetting how rough it was in the earliest versions.

While introduction of auto-typing through "var" helped a lot with that, you'd still regularly have to fight if you wanted to properly initialise arrays with values, because the syntax was just not always obvious.

Collection literals are amazing, and now the ability to pass things into the constructor means they can be used when you need constructor parameters too, that's just a good thing as you say.

[pjmlp]

Ah, but because they have to keep everyone happy, you can choose between var or new(), and then we need to teach both to juniors.

[raincole]

> The example you point out is the advanced case, someone only needs in a very specific case

This is exactly how C++ landed where it is now. Every time it's "you only need to know that syntax if..." well it ends up everyone has to know that syntax because someone will use it and if you're a responsible programmer you'll end up reading a lot code written from other people.

[LunicLynx]

An unbeatable argument, really.

But still there is a difference between learning and mastering.

I recently helped my partner learn for her CS class, and I feel very comfortable arguing that my previous statement holds up.

Mastering? No, in that case I agree with you.

[hirvi74]

One issue I have with all these syntax changes is that they are all just more overhead for one to remember. All for what though? Just to just save a few more keystrokes?

I work on multiple applications with different versions of C# and/or Dotnet. I find it quite annoying to have to remember what syntax sugar is allowed in which versions.

If C# did not want verbose syntax, then Java was a poor choice to imitate.

[pjmlp]

C# only exists because Sun did not allow Microsoft to keep using J++.

Without the lawsuit, COM+ Runtime (aka .NET) would have used J++, as originally designed in the Ext-VOS paper.

[jayd16]

> Try teaching someone C# nowadays

Do you actually have a datapoint of someone failing to understand C# or are you just hyperbolically saying its a big language? The tooling, the ecosystem, the linting, the frameworks. Its a very easy language to get into...

[mrsmrtss]

Exactly, we have had many interns with zero C# experience become fluent in a couple of months and those with prior TypeScript or Java experience get there even faster. A good IDE (like Rider) helps also.

[Metasyntactic]

Hi there! One of the C# language designers here, working on unions. And the author of that feature :D

So I'm happy to discuss the thinking here. It's not about saving keystrokes. It's about our decision that users shouldn't have 7 (yes 7) different ways of creating collections. They should just be able to target at least 99% of all cases where a collection is needed, with one simple and uniform syntax across all those cases.

When we created and introduced collection expressions, it was able to get close to that goal. But there were still cases left out, leaving people in the unenviable position of having to keep their code inconsistent.

This feature was tiny, and is really intended for those few percent of cases where you were stuck having to do things the much more complex way (see things like immutable builders as an example), just to do something simple, like adding an `IEqualityComparer<>`. This was also something that would become even more relevant as we add `k:v` support to our collections to be able to make dictionaries.

[twisteriffic]

> Try teaching someone C# nowadays. Completely impossible.

That isn't a reasonable take. Failing to teach a language by enumerating all its features is an indictment of the instructor and not the language.

[NanoCoaster]

I guess I overdramatized the situation a bit :) It's a passionate topic for me; as somebody who has been using C# at work for 10 years now, I'm just not happy with the direction the language has been taking.

You're right, it's not impossible and in general it's not among the hardest languages to teach. But I would argue, it is heading that way.

There are already so many ways to do things in C#. For example, try explaining the difference between fields and properties; sounds easy, but making it really stick is quite a challenge. And that's one of the simplest cases (and a feature I'm 100% in favor of).

And you will have to explain it at some point, because real codebases contain these features so at some point, it'll need to be taught. Learning a language doesn't stop when you can write a simple application, it continues up until at least you're comfortable with most of its features and their practical use. The quicker one can get people to that point, the easier the language is to teach, I'd argue.

One might also argue that learning never really stops, but that's beside the point :)

In general, my issue isn't any specific feature. C# has many features that are non-trivial to learn but still great: value types, generics, expression trees. Source generators are relatively new and I like them! I like most of the things they're doing in the standard library or the runtime. Spans everywhere is a nice improvement, most new APIs are sensible and nice to use and the runtime just keeps getting faster every release. Great. It's more the pure C# language side I have an issue with.

But every language has a budget of innovation and cognitive load that you can expect people to deal with, and C# is not using its budget very wisely in my opinion.

[Metasyntactic]

> I guess I overdramatized the situation a bit :) It's a passionate topic for me; as somebody who has been using C# at work for 10 years now, I'm just not happy with the direction the language has been taking.

You should come engage with us on this then :)

We do all our design in the open on github. And a lot of us are available to chat and discuss all this stuff in Discord and the like :)

> C# is not using its budget very wisely in my opinion.

I can promise you. Every feature you think are great had similar detractors over the years. Every Single One :)

[raincole]

> Try teaching someone C# nowadays. Completely impossible. Really, I wish they would've given F# just a tenth of the love that C# got over the years

If they actually put effort in F#, it would have reached "unteachable" state already :)

[NanoCoaster]

Haha, yeah, maybe :)

I would've loved an F# that found a way to improve on the performance issues, especially when using computation expressions. That and, either, a deeper integration of .NETs native OOP subtyping, or some form of OCaml-like module system, would have been enough to make it an almost perfect language for my tastes.

Obviously, these are big, and maybe impossible, issues. But Microsoft as a whole never really dedicated enough resources to find out. I feel for the people still working on it, their work is definitely appreciated :)

[LunicLynx]

My knowledge on functional languages is limited, but as I understand it, it’s possible to formulate expressions that are basically NP problems? And hence impossible to speed up?

So is it a F# issue or inherent to functional programming?

[NanoCoaster]

AFAIK it was a much more down-to-earth thing. The implementation of computation expressions in F# compiled down to lots of function objects that were not very GC-friendly. Or something like that. To be honest, I never looked that deeply at it :)

Looking at it, the MS docs contain something about this exact topic, so maybe it's better nowadays: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/fsharp/language-ref...

Sadly, I haven't used F# for years at this point so I can't speak to the current state.

[throw234234234]

F# has since gotten Functional State machines which make many computation expressions more efficient (https://github.com/fsharp/fslang-design/blob/main/FSharp-6.0...). Been there a while.

I actually think F# has received some "love" over the recent years contrary to some on this forum; that feature being an example. My view, maybe unpopular but in the age of AI maybe less so, is there is a diminishing returns to language features anyway w.r.t complexity and the use cases that new feature will actually apply for. F# in my mind and many other languages now for that matter is pretty much there or are almost there; the languages are converging. When I used F# I liked how it unified features and tried to keep things simple. Features didn't feel "tacked on" mostly with some later exceptions.

Last time I used F# a few libraries started adopting this for their CE's (e.g. IcedTasks library, etc).

[Pay08]

This is why I have always been leery of C# and continued using Java instead. C#s development has always seemed very haphazard and kitchen sink mentality to me.

[pjmlp]

I think they now have an issue getting new language features every year, this is how it comes to be.