| > Your definition of strong sounds different to other peoples. There was entire FixWPF grass roots campaign to petition more investment into WPF, twitter account is at: https://twitter.com/fixwpf they also had a website and blog pleading for MS to keep investing in WPF and fix its issues. WPF still works very well, it is not broken. It is still one of the best UI toolkits ever constructed with a lot of flexibility that I don't think is still appreciated enough. > When and what was the most recent feature added to WPF? No clue. I'm as curious as everyone else. > You may not, but most popular languages can be developed without and IDE, which is important for simplicity / deployment / portability. As far as I'm concerned, the IDE is a part of the language and at the very least the programming experience. People programming in emacs and VIM will eventually retire, the future is undeniable at this point. A language designed for an IDE will work better in an IDE than a language that is designed for least common dominator development environments. But then I'm biased since that is part of my research. And also, Dart is so far very weak on the IDE side. I wonder if the Dart team has lots of compiler people and not a lot of IDE people, or if they have the same old-fashioned mindset as you in de-emphasizing the value of a good IDE experience. But I would expect it to get better, they hired Luke Church after all. > It's so totally usable that MS invented a new completely different language written for creating command-line scripts (PowerShell). PowerShell is an optional tool, not required. I've seen huge C# projects build from a CMD prompt (not that I want to bother with build configuration management myself). > Citation needed, it's not as performant as the JVM Citation needed, in my experience, C# kicks the JVM's butt in Win performance. Reified generics also reduce lots of boxing issues. > The Sudoku benchmarks shows that it's slower (and more verbose) than Dart Your numbers are completely whack. First, it shows mono being faster than the CLR, oh and you are using a virtual machine on top of that. Do you really think people will take that seriously? Also, do you ever try..you know..a multi-threaded shared memory solution? > The DLR team has actually been disbanded with the primary developer behind it (Jim Hugunin / IronPython) having left Microsoft (http://hugunin.net/microsoft_farewell.html) to now work at Google on the Dart project no less. Jim and Jon are gone, but the work they did is totally still around and works wonderfully. I use it, its fast, and it puts C# on par or beyond with any dynamic language that supports dynamic eval. > Dynamic itself is a heavyweight solution and may many suggest may have been a mistake, C# 6.0 is actually introducing new '$' syntax to avoid dynamic and make working with dictionaries better. I'm not talking about C#'s dynamic language feature, which I don't really care for, but dynamic expression tree compilation that came along with the rest of the DLR. As a language implementer, it is very useful. |
What exactly do you think the FixWPF campaign was about? And what else have you used? If it's so good, why are so few Windows desktop apps that come with Windows written with it? At least Apple uses Cocoa for all its OSX Desktop apps which I find to be of much higher quality and has smoother performance.
> People programming in emacs and VIM will eventually retire, the future is undeniable at this point.
You're making it sound most developers using text editors are old kooks with 1-foot into retirement. How disconnected are you? What % of OSS projects on GitHub do you think use an IDE? More or less than 50%? https://github.com/trending
> Dart is so far very weak on the IDE side. I wonder if the Dart team has lots of compiler people and not a lot of IDE people,
They actually have quite a few IDE people on the team with many years of experience developing IDE tooling. Any immaturity is simply that the DartEditor is still so young. It was only recently that they rewrote the old Analyzer that was previously written in Java to Dart, which now runs much faster. No doubt VS benefits from a large experienced IDE team as would JetBrains.
> I've seen huge C# projects build from a CMD prompt
Seeing something done once doesn't extrapolate itself into a common use-case or a well-supported story, which it isn't. Having to maintain your own build scripts is a slow, painful and mundane experience which is why it's a rarely considered approach. Even the just released Swift has a better command-line story than C#, which supports #! scripts, a command-line REPL and LLVM debugger.
> Citation needed, in my experience, C# kicks the JVM's butt in Win performance.
Citation is still needed. Where can this butt kicking be seen?
> Your numbers are completely whack. First, it shows mono being faster than the CLR, oh and you are using a virtual machine on top of that.
They're not my numbers, that's the actual output from the command-line Console apps which you can see on the project page. But don't take my iMac's word for it, all the source code is there, run the benchmarks yourself. Your 2 points aren't exclusive, there is no "on top of that" they were all run from my iMac, I would've run C#/.NET natively, but y'know that's hard to do when it's the only platform that doesn't work cross-platform. Running inside Parallels likely accounts for about 10-15% performance overhead, it doesn't explain 2.3x worst performance.
> As a language implementer, it is very useful.
Language VM features that are optimal for compiler writers doesn't translate itself into killer general-purpose language features for everyone else.