Source: got to interact with the community between the C# 1.0 and 4.0 releases (2.0 added generics, 3.0 added lambdas, neither feature was considered of any use to a Productive Developer up to the day when Microsoft officially announced them).
That isn't true inside Microsoft. Many of the people who work on C# are the same academic wanks that work on Scala or F#. C# has a different user base from those languages though, so they still have to be careful what they add to the language, and many language features are planned 3 or 4 versions in advance.
No, that was not intended as included in "the C# community". Hell, SPJ used to work at Microsoft (he may still do, but he used to).
> the people who work on C# are the same academic wanks that work on Scala or F#
I'm sure you mean wonks, but I liked the typo.
> C# has a different user base from those languages though, so they still have to be careful what they add to the language, and many language features are planned 3 or 4 versions in advance.
I have no issue with the evolution of C# rate or otherwise, only with a number of its users.
C# has a specific audience, and the language designers cater to them pretty well. I really really like C# as a language, and I don't mind delayed access to certain features that I already like from other languages.
You probably have a beef with some C# users not because of their choice of language, but with the field they work in (primarily enterprise) tends to breed a certain kind of attitude that other techies don't like very much.
(says a man planning to purchase his 5th Macbook Pro later this year)
There are good reasons to use C#, so when it gets a new feature that other languages have had for years, well, it is newsworthy.
Now when will javascript get pattern matching?
C# and Java are slowly catching up :)
Human behaviour is strange when you expect rationality. Sour grapes is such a pervasive cognitive bias that one has to wonder why it exists since it's obviously irrational. I think it's likely that it presents a major advantage in the psychology of group cohesion.
Yeah, I find it strange how languages are trending at a glacially slow pace to having the same features that strongly typed functional programming languages have had for literally decades. It's like we're going to be using actual functional programming languages eventually but the only way it'll happen is to very slowly change what everyone is currently using in small steps.
Static types, immutability, type inference and non-null variables are popular design choices right now but they've been in functional programming languages for nearly 50 years. I'm still waiting for inductive types and pattern matching to turn up in a mainstream language and seeing them talked about like they're new concepts.