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Comment by smitherfield | Hacker News Reader

Not a trendy language by any means, but C# meets all your criteria.

1. About the strongest OOP support of any language which doesn’t have a dynamic or Scala-esque exotic type system. Also supports non-OOP imperative, unlike Java.

2. Linq is nigh-on the best FP support offered in any non-FP language’s standard library, and really is one of the best FP libraries period.

3. Invented async/await, by far the most ergonomic concurrency primitive yet created.

4. Fast and easy to tune for performance (stack-allocated value types which can also be passed by reference).

5. If you know Java or C++ you’ll be productive within minutes.

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I had used Scala for many years before trying C#, and I have to agree. The only thing that I really missed in C# were higher-kinded types.

I think I'd miss pattern matching the most.

The first time I saw how pattern matching with regular expressions automatically extracted the matching bits I was sold.

I'd also miss block expressions. I keep wanting to write if-expressions (as opposed to if-statements) in every non-scala language I touch.

But I agree, c#/.net is a good alternative if you're used to the expressiveness of scala.

It is not at the same level as Scala, but C# 7 has pattern matching.

There's F# and then there's "F* " language that seem to have higher-kinded types

(I really mean F* as in 'F-star' language)

> 3. Invented async/await, by far the most ergonomic concurrency primitive yet created.

This feels like a bit of hyperbole. The actor model seems much more intuitive than async/await. Indeed, message passing between actors is how concurrency works in the real world (think about how people interact with each other).

I knew I'd get pushback on that one, it is somewhat hyperbolic; I'm here using "most ergonomic" to mean "closest source-level similarity to the synchronous equivalent." Which is perhaps not the "best" way to model concurrency, but has the advantage of being very easy to learn.

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