Microsoft C# named programming language of 2012

IT World ^ | 01/28/2013 | Sophie Curtis, Techworld

[FredZarguna]

A key advantage is that it has a nice, shallow learning curve.

This, like "I could care less" instead of "I couldn't care less." is said by people all the time and is actually the opposite of what you mean.

The learning curve is a graph of knowledge acquired vs. time. A "nice" learning curve is steep. A shallow learning curve means you've have been working a very long time and have not acquired very much knowledge.

Tonight's Pedantic Momement^TM has been broguht to you by Bristol-Meyers.

[dfwgator]

PERL is the web application COBOL. It is still used all over the place in legacy apps.

[dfwgator]

What about JQuery? That is essentially JavaScript, but I’m not sure if it gets considered as JavaScript.

[dfwgator]

I am a big fan of Apache Wicket to develop Java-based web apps....I can build my HTML file and get all of the CSS goodness worked out in any HTML design app, then code the matching Java class to pop the data onto the page. Writing reusable components is a snap. And it really works well with toolkits, like Twitter Bootstrap.

[douginthearmy]

Well, I am writing most of my Master’s project in python and some c, but I really like C#. It’s one of Microsoft’s better accomplishments.

[tacticalogic]

It can't be meaner than what my former pal and mentor wrote and could not understand immediately after he wrote it, but when he did (understand it) he could not explain it understandably to anyone, and which regular expression despite or perhaps because of it all worked!

Regex is one of those things everyone hates, but nobody has ever found anything better to replace it with.

Somebody asked me once if regex was left-brain or right-brain. I told them writing them is right-brain and reading them is left-brain.

[cynwoody]

Oddly, there’s no F#

Au contraire: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/F_Sharp_(programming_language)

FWIW, a residual reason to pay attention to MSFT.

However, most folks in the field will gravitate in the Haskell direction.

[cynwoody]

JavaScript is only a client-side scripting language

Huh?

[ApplegateRanch]

There any resources for C♭?

Isn't C♭ a little dated? Maybe this will help point you the right direction?

[FreedomPoster]

Still around.

http://www.borland.com/

And it gets even better. They’re now owned by Micro Focus, most well known in the early PC era for Micro Focus COBOL.

It looks like they’re primarily development tools these days, and still do COBOL. Don’t see anything about Pascal. I know some guys who do smartphone development who use Silk, one of their tools.

[Dr. Sivana]

That story is not true.

Whether it is or not, we are all still using QWERTY keyboards. (For the handful of DVORAK users out there, I am sure you are still regularly faced with having to change gears and use a QWERTY when not at your base machine).

[Dr. Sivana]

C, C++, C#, Java, Pascal, Object Pascal are all Algol-60 based languages,

So one could truthfully say that Al Gol is largely responsible for the Internet.

[OneWingedShark]

I've been using C# since the day it came out (although not exclusively) and it has become my favorite when building application that will run on Windows.

For simple things RAD is great; though I believe that it's done a huge disservice to the world -- namely the "code-behind" style. [At least] half of the applications I've had to maintain in C# had the propensity to use labels as a sort of global variable (this possibly in addition to the variable/property that label's value comes from -- introducing sorts of aliasing/synchronization problems).

For my own new development, I try to (a) build the algorithms (and state-machine/-variable interactions) first, then (b) slap the GUI on, displaying what's needed as necessary -- this avoids the problem of making the program overly-dependent on the GUI.

That said, I'm a fan of Delphi, and I can see Ander's [Delphi] influence/experience in C#. So it's not all bad -- but then again, I've been working in Ada on my home projects for a few years and it's a real pain to go back to languages that weren't designed for both correctness and maintainability. One such feature is case-coverage, validating that every possible value in a discrete type (esp. enumerations) appears in a switch-statement, which is impossible in C# because enumerations are really 'int'. (It is technically impossible to implement general case-coverage in C#: the simplest reason being that it allows switch on strings, which can be of arbitrary/unbounded length.)

I've found DataGridView to be a very flexible and easy control to use.

It may be simpler to use [in general practice] than my experience with it has been; but again I am doing upkeep/extension on software likely originally written by someone in a "just get it done" mentality who was unconcerned with maintainability (judging by how the program is structured and the amount of cut-n-paste/code-behinds -- you know, like when the guy has a print button and a preview button and both contain the same code instead of, say, having the same handler attached to both with a little prolog before the main portion determining which option [print or preview] was pushed). -- Given some of what searches turned up regarding some of my troubles it looks like it's not always easy-to-use.

[OneWingedShark]

PHP is a long way from dying, but it’s obsolescence is becoming apparent.

IMO, PHP needs to die. Its fast and loose playing w/ types is, I believe, cause enough for legal liability in any system dealing with finances.

As an example, consider the translation of some numeric string to an integer which is done automatically. If the string's value is "06" or "07" then the integer-result is that number, but if it is "08" or "09" then the resultant integer is 0 -- this is because the translation views the leading 0 as a flag that you are dealing with Octal, and 8 or 9 are not valid octal numbers so the value 0 is returned (indicative of an error in the parsing); it is because this error-value is itself a valid output that there is thus no way to catch the error.

(There are many other problems, but that one lends itself to a short, obvious explanation illustrating the dangers of PHP's design philosophy.)

[OneWingedShark]

This, like "I could care less" instead of "I couldn't care less." is said by people all the time and is actually the opposite of what you mean.

The learning curve is a graph of knowledge acquired vs. time. A "nice" learning curve is steep. A shallow learning curve means you've have been working a very long time and have not acquired very much knowledge.

Tonight's Pedantic MomementTM has been broguht to you by Bristol-Meyers.

Or, instead of time it could be "effort/work" (thus payoff vs. effort) and in this case there's a radically different meaning -- indeed it would be [roughly] the transposition of the X and Y coordinates in the aforementioned "knowledge vs. time" (it would be exact iff the ratio of work to time was fixed).

[OneWingedShark]

Oooohhh... a programming language holy war.

They are fun, aren't they? ;)

Personally, I never left Turbo Pascal for a high-level language. And there's always assembler for important stuff. ;)

TP was pretty good stuff, certainly superior to C/C++ as far as reliability/maintainability go; with the philosophy of detecting errors at the earliest possible point (statically, at compile-time, if possible), means that it is inherently a better choice for developing large systems.

Though I believe Ada to be superior to even TP -- it was designed with reliability and maintainability in mind, looking at both programming-in-the-small (generics, type-attributes, subtyping) and the large (packages [which can be generic], task-types, true spec/body separation)... I find it slightly saddening that more languages forgo [any?] thought on maintainability.

[OneWingedShark]

Still around.
http://www.borland.com/

And it gets even better. They’re now owned by Micro Focus, most well known in the early PC era for Micro Focus COBOL.
It looks like they’re primarily development tools these days, and still do COBOL. Don’t see anything about Pascal. I know some guys who do smartphone development who use Silk, one of their tools.

TP became Delphi, which was spun-out/sold-to another company -- I think there was several sales, or talks thereof, because I vaguely remember worries that it would become like WordPerfect -- however, that fear has not been realized as Embarcadero is still around and doing [active] development on the product, IDE, and language... while WP seems to be getting the breadcrumbs left over from Corel's focus on its image/video software.

[OneWingedShark]

The one place where NO language has come anywhere close to C++ even now is in template metaprogramming and Generics.

This is incorrect; Ada has a wonderful generic system.
subprograms can be parametrized on a type (or other functions, ranges, tasks, values, packages, etc.), as can packages themselves; wikipedia has an entry about Ada's generic-system on it's generic programming page.

The consequence of the above is you can make programs with a high amount of safe reuse (decomposing common elements); for example:

1. You can define an interface (or abstract base-type in Ada 95/2005/2012) for operating on via PostScript,
2. You can make a generic package defining a type which uses the interface from #1,
3. You can make another generic package defining a [type of] stack, instantiate it using objects of the interface from #1,
4. you can make another generic package which takes the package [from #3], defines four [IIRC] stack-variables (two for working, two containing "dictionaries" for functions), and operations thereon
5. and another containing the [rest of] general postscript commands

and you'd have a PostScript interpreter.

Now some people think that the template/metaprogramming ability is more powerful than the generic facility of Ada because it is Turing-complete; this is actually quite a step backward WRT safety -- because it is Turing-complete you can state your problem in the template itself, which is not guaranteed to finish (precisely because it is Turing-complete).

[OneWingedShark]

I don’t program in any of those languages. I do, however write a mean regular expression, which the people at work who do use those languages seem to find quite useful.

Do you're the person I need to hunt down and kill! [j/k]

But on a more serious note, I absolute loathe regular expressions -- as most of my career has been maintenance/additional-development regex always becomes a pain in the ass.

Example:
The original requirement was validating the phone-number was 7 digits, now it has to be 7-digits w/ the '-' optional in NNN-NNNN form... oh, now we need it to recognize area-codes (NNN)-NNN-NNNN, oh now it also needs to accept NNN-NNN-NNNN... oh, now it needs to understand country codes... oh now it needs to accept the proper format based on the country-code.

*Sigh*

[tacticalogic]

"You have a problem. You decide to solve it using a regular expression. Now you have two problems."

-Author Unknown

A collary, seen recently:

"You have a problem. You decide to solve it using threads. problems Now have two you."