Twenty years of C# with Anders Hejlsberg [audio]

Re:Twenty years of C# with Anders Hejlsberg [audio] by hackerfromthefu on Friday February 11, 2022 @12:28AM (#30297397)

According to the interviews Anders has given that has been by explicit design.

Anders very much creates 'pragmatic industry languages' that optimize for the broader use rather than the individual use. An important part of this is ability for various developers to work on each other's code bases, relatively efficiently.

The contrast to this is a Clojure where you can end up creating basically a DSL that's optimized to the problem space, but that language is then unique to the application and with a higher learning curve when a new developer has to pick it up.

In one of his interviews Anders specifically said he doesn't like AOP because it allows the creation of 'magic' that is hard to understand for other developers. And that's very true at the margins - sure the standard use cases of e.g. logging are not so hard to grok, but it's possibly to weave together incredibly complex/hard to understand/hard to reverse engineer/easy to misunderstand systems when AOP is used heavily or exotically.

So it makes perfect sense when considering he is optimising for an 'industry language' not a 'superstar whose code is hard to average developers to work with' language, that AOP is not in the core language, especially considering extensions such as PostSharp are available.

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Re:Twenty years of C# with Anders Hejlsberg [audio] by VincentEvans on Friday February 11, 2022 @10:02AM (#30302218)

I’ve heard the same thing mentioned before, but I wonder if the same principles are still held firm or if it’s a new day. I think in the last 20 years C# has accumulated quite a bit of complexity that makes me doubt that the language designers are still firm on this. Take Roslin for an example.

I think that some concerns about possible complexity brought on by AOP are true, but I think they are pretty comparable to what one might be concerned about as it relates to Roslin.

But I am not trying to convince anyone really, I am just answering the posters question: what do I wish was added to C#.

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Re:Twenty years of C# with Anders Hejlsberg [audio] by hackerfromthefu on Friday February 11, 2022 @11:20AM (#30303208)

For anyone not familiar, Roslyn is the language server for compilation, analysis and refactoring of code.

I don't understand the premise of your post but I would like to.

How does having these advanced features at the code compilation stage which is used by compiler and visual studio plugin programmers, have any affect on the complexity of application developers? The application developer doesn't have to think about Roslyn/language server at all, they just consume it's features. The application developer is concerned with the complexity/magic in the code, not how the code was compiled?

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Re:Twenty years of C# with Anders Hejlsberg [audio] by VincentEvans on Saturday February 12, 2022 @08:25AM (#30312623)

Perhaps I am not referring to the correct technology/feature if you find it so confusing? In my post all I was trying to say is that enabling writing code that generates predicates, expressions etc, literally syntactical building blocks of more code - via code in an inception-like manner - seems to be at least equally complex an endeavor as somewhat arguably non-trivial matter of creating or using python-like AOP decorator “proxies”. So presence of Roslyn kind of disproves that the emphasis on simplicity is still in effect, at least in my mind. Hope that clears up my point.

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Re:Twenty years of C# with Anders Hejlsberg [audio] by hackerfromthefu on Friday February 11, 2022 @11:37AM (#30303472)

I've just happened to stumble on this discussion on a C# 11 feature, where someone who I think is on the language team (HaloFour)says ".. using source generators for AOP has been effectively rejected by the language team ..".

https://github.com/dotnet/csharplang/discussions/5735#discus...

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Re:Twenty years of C# with Anders Hejlsberg [audio] by VincentEvans on Saturday February 12, 2022 @08:42AM (#30312752)

I don’t think this is a new revelation, but rather someone re-stating what was already stated in the original doc introducing source generators that I’ve read a few month ago, around November 2021-ish? … which said something along the lines that they explicitly making it impossible to use it for AOP.

Personally I think that dogmatic crusade against AOP while adding a menagerie of syntax sugar hieroglyphics :? :: !! :+ … is a bit misguided, but whatever.

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Re:Twenty years of C# with Anders Hejlsberg [audio] by VincentEvans on Saturday February 12, 2022 @08:50AM (#30312795)

First question in the FAQ section:

https://devblogs.microsoft.com/dotnet/introducing-c-source-g...

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