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A comment on Microsoft takes .NET open source and cross-platform. Parent comment

Re:Microsoft takes .NET open source and cross-platform by seanmcdirmid on Wednesday November 12, 2014 @05:12PM (#8598603)
I went from scala to C# 7 years ago, and after some feature withdrawal, I began to like C# for its simplicity. It was not very elegant, I often had to settle for ugly solutions, but this was actually a step up from scala where I would obsess to find the most elegant solution for my code. In C#, the best way is more obvious even if not that good, and you settle more quickly.

As the language is considered holistically with tooling, the error messages are always good and they don't make dubious decisions (getting rid of semi colons) that are theoretically sound but screw up tooling.

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Re:Microsoft takes .NET open source and cross-platform by frowaway001 on Wednesday November 12, 2014 @05:19PM (#8598646)
> they don't make dubious decisions (getting rid of semi colons) that are theoretically sound but screw up tooling

Wait WUT? I'm not sure you know what you are talking about ... that just doesn't make any sense.

Scala 7 years ago is fundamentally different from today's Scala, so I'm not seeing how your experience is relevant anymore.

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Re:Microsoft takes .NET open source and cross-platform by seanmcdirmid on Wednesday November 12, 2014 @05:34PM (#8598726)
Taking out semi colons reduced the amount of redundant information needed for error recovery in the parser, leading to poorer error messages and reducing the quality of interactive IDE feedback. I know this because I was working in the IDE when martin made the decision. Maybe it was the right decision, but there were definitely costs!

There is a very good reason they will never eliminate semi colons from C#, the visual studio team would never let them...C# is developed in a completely different style from Scala.

I'm sure you are right: scala today is probably a much more simple language with great IDE support...7 years ago, it was a bunch of advanced features and building a decent IDE for it was a struggle.

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