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Re:The search for easier safe systems programming by dartos on Wednesday May 08, 2024 @09:27AM (#40297887)
I have tried C# recently.

They have support for these features, but they require some ceremony to use (like wrapping function arguments in a Callable), which increases friction, signal to noise ratio, and decreases the expressiveness that I want.

I just want to write what I want without having to think too much about how the language wants me to write it. Go is good for that. JS too, but has a lot of historical cruft.

Re:The search for easier safe systems programming by kkukshtel on Wednesday May 08, 2024 @04:47PM (#40302577)
I feel like your "recent" must have still been years ago. Modern C# is as terse as Python/TS/Js for basically any equivalent task, if not more so. Dotnet 8 even make the following possible:

var foo = [1,2,3];

Add on switch expressions, primary ctors, first class functions, no ceremony in Program.cs anymore... it's hard to get more terse and expressive unless you want lots of chained single symbol operators (look at F#).

Re:The search for easier safe systems programming by neonsunset on Wednesday May 08, 2024 @06:02PM (#40303165)
(slight correction: `var foo = [1, 2, 3];` requires natural types for collection literals (it needs to infer the best type for var), this is coming in C# 13 (.NET 9, this November), but otherwise `int[] numbers = [1, 2, 3];` works)
Re:The search for easier safe systems programming by kkukshtel on Thursday May 09, 2024 @11:33AM (#40309289)
You're right! I remember some session where they talked about wanting to infer a natural type for stuff like that but its obviously a big question. But as you said declaring the type directly allows it to work. However the other nice part is that you _can_ do this:

void myFunc(List<int>){}

myFunc([1,2,3]);

The expression sytanx can infer the type from the caller syntax so you can just inline the array declaration.

Re:The search for easier safe systems programming by dartos on Wednesday May 08, 2024 @10:46PM (#40304805)
My recent was a month ago, but to be fair, the CTO of that company (who wrote the existing code when I joined) last wrote production code in 2008, so his code may have not been using those newer syntax features.
Re:The search for easier safe systems programming by kkukshtel on Thursday May 09, 2024 @11:30AM (#40309255)
Yeah it's very easy to write Java style C# that is incredibly verbose and rigid, but once you understand modern c# you can see how it's this really great (imo, awesome) hybrid of functional/typed languages. They've done a ton of syntax work to let types get out of your way when you need them to, with the ability to always fallback to rigidly declaring them when you need better readability.

The downside of all this is that the only people that know how awesome C# is are people who are already doing C#. Growing the pot and trying to convince people to give it a go in its modern (post dotnet 5/"core") iteration is like pulling teeth. Everyone assumes nothing has changed since like C# 2, and given the fact it's a "boring" language that doesn't have Hacker Hype behind it, people just ignore it.

Every week you have people on HN wishing for something that does exactly what C# does but don't want to give it a shot or admit that C# is _actually_ an incredible language and toolset that does exactly what they want (and more).