[joelangeway]

This is a fundamental place where the worlds of C# and Java differ. Where the Java world would say, "developers might misuse this, better not have it in the language," the C# world says, "developers could really use this, better put it in the language."

[meaty]

And if you've worked on a large project with a lot of cats to herd for both platforms, you will appreciate java very quickly.

[charlieflowers]

But it doesn't appear (anecdotally I admit) that people feel that way. Seems the "whole world" (speaking loosely) is turning against Java because of this very philosophy.

Because Java has been so conservative, people actively hate it's verbosity, boilerplate-ness, and lack of language features (anonymous functions, first class functions, etc.).

So Java has, for many years, helped huge teams of mediocre developers avoid certain kinds of self-inflicted wounds by being conservative in terms of language features. And the result seems to be that Java is increasingly scorned.

I know if I had to replace my C# work with Java, I'd feel incredibly frustrated at the lack of language power. In fact, I wouldn't choose to do it -- it would have to be a hell of a project or opportunity to pull me into it.

(Luckily for me, there are many better options, like Clojure or Scala on the JVM, or Haskell, Python, Ruby, etc. off the JVM).

[meaty]

I'm not sure java is being increasingly scorned. The scorners are just noisier.

[JanJansen]

I work on a pretty huge C# code base. Use of LINQ is the least of it's problems. If anything I'd say one problem is people not knowing about things like lambda expressions, linq, generics or whatever. It can really make code harder to parse when it's written in ways that don't take advantage of the full power of the platform.

[meaty]

Yes until we get to:

List<List<Tuple<int, Dictionary<string, object>, string>>>

[SideburnsOfDoom]

If you're doing that it's crap code; you should have defined a few named object types. Maybe your "Dictionary<string, object>" is e.g. actually a "PropertyMap". this is not a problem in the c# language.

See also: "primitive obsession" http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?PrimitiveObsession http://sourcemaking.com/refactoring/primitive-obsession

[meaty]

Not at all - you just missed a few facts that need considering. Lets rip it to bits some more:

It's in system.windows.forms isn't it? Don't really want that dependency and associated resolution being dragged in to a web app otherwise the compiler has to load the entire assembly's metadata.

Also, it requires full trust.

Oh and finally it isn't serializable.

Which is why we end up with SerializableDictionary<K, V> which is even longer and is an adaptor for Dictionary<K,V> which implements serialization.

That's why it all sucks.

And I haven't even included ConcurrentDictionary thread safety yet.

The whole thing is a fucking mess.

[SideburnsOfDoom]

The typical experience isn't that bad, let alone "The whole thing is"

[MichaelGG]

In my experience, that kind of stuff is usually a problem mainly because of C#'s verbosity from lack of type inference. Although, with 4 unnamed elements there, it might start making sense to create a new type, and then it's just "List<List<MyRecord>>".

[ams6110]

How much of that C# code pre-dates the availablilty of those features?

[JanJansen]

Some of the code was certainly written before those features was available, especially some C# 4 features. I'm sure someone might look at my code someday and wonder why I didn't use async and await. I'm talking about code written today though.

[joelangeway]

I concede the point. I hope I never have to herd that many cats.