I ask because I have never delved into C# only heard it's Microsoft's Java. And I am no fan of the original Java at all so C# gives me pause.
Speaking as someone who started with Java 1.2 and saw all the crap that happened to it.
C# is currently lightyears ahead of Java in every way, especially now that MS is not Micro$oft to people on the internet any more =)
Let’s not claim things that can’t be objectively proven. C# does have much more features than Java, but that is not necessarily a plus in case of a programming language. There are features that are definitely better, but I am not bought that the whole would be.
Plus, ecosystem-wise Java is much bigger and much more open-source. The runtime is also better on the JVM-side, though this is offset by C# expressing more low level details.
I've been doing C# on a MacBook with JetBrains Rider for years. Some code runs in Linux containers, some on AWS Lambda.
I rather do .NET than Java, but the FOSS story isn't as Microsoft sells it, hence why on our agency .NET is mostly used on Windows projects, and usually loses against Java or node in UNIX like RFP, even after .NET Core reboot, because of dependencies and existing enterprise tooling.
DI is almost always in web, but via constructor instead of annotations.
Similarly recent libraries such ASP.NET have been working hard to use more of these things to eliminate their own boilerplate. The latest ASP.NET templates use top-level statements and some global usings and are getting very lightweight in terms of starter-level code.
.NET does have annotations and dependency inversion, but those too tend to avoid boilerplate more than create it. Few annotations are "required", depending on your domain and which libraries you are expecting to use. .NET now has a single, mostly standardized dependency injector that almost everyone has agreed to use (Microsoft.Extensions.DependencyInjection) at this point. It intentionally only supports a bare minimum of Dependency Injection needs and is nothing like the Kitchen Sink approach of something like Java's Spring. (For instance, zero out of the box support for wiring Dependency Injection via XML files. .NET's DI is always code driven, often in a Startup.cs, Program.cs, App.cs, or Main.cs file.)
I've been increasingly finding in C# that I'm writing new code with zero templates and almost no snippets-expansion. (There will always be plenty of legacy code out there with much more verbosity, of course.)
The easiest suggestion is to try it for yourself. The `dotnet` tool is cross-platform, generally an easy install, and its `dotnet new` command will help you try many easy template types. You can relatively easily work entirely in VS Code today (as opposed to older versions of C# often "needed" the full bulky Visual Studio install for templates, language servers, and other stuff).
I do hope to try it maybe in recent future.
They had me at features, lost me at manual compilation ordering.
C# can fake algebraic data types in some ways/some cases. Though if you are expecting to do a lot of it you are still better off in F# or C#/F# hybrid projects. (F# of course being a proper ML-family language.)
Or in Scala, technically not an ML, but is as close as you'll get in a nominally typed language.
enum RGB:
case Red, Green, Blue
def log(x: RGB) = x match
case Red => print("red")
case Green => print("green")
// error, not exhaustive
Ton of powerful languages to choose from these days, good times...