Hacker News Reader

Comment by ecoffey | Hacker News Reader

I skimmed part of this, and had to giggle a bit at this quote (of a quote):

"It's clear that C# isn't the best language to use for Web Development. Just ask the guys who are writing the frameworks with it."

Sure C# is verbose. But I still feel it's pretty expressive. I'm working on a web framework in C# (http://github.com/ecoffey/Bebop). Granted it's totally a toy thing, but still. Looks beautiful to me :-P

Also it annoys me he compares non-idiomatic C# with idiomatic Ruby.

I guess I should quote this FTA: "My whole point here is to tell you why I like it - not to convince you of anything.", and finish with it all comes back to the right tool for the job shrug.

View on HN

Beyond the verbosity, my issue with C# (and even worse, Java) is that they're no good at what the web needs. The staticity gets in the way, it means the language has a hard time bridging before the "everything is a String" world of the wider web and the internal "everything is such and such type". These languages are hard (especially with generics) where the web is soft. In Python or Ruby, you can just deserialize JSON to native types, drill down your dicts and lists as needed and call it a day.

In C# or Java, you'll have to define exactly how your dicts nest and everything (or give up type safety), and that means you have a much lower flexibility.

Finally, C-inherited Java are dreadful at string munging. Which is understandable, they don't really like strings after all, but again the wider web deals with strings a lot (if not almost exclusively), that means one more clash.

The verbosity of both C# and Java just appall me.

It would seem to me that verbosity and expressiveness are opposites - a language which inherently uses many lines to express an action is a language which inherently expresses little per line. How could it be otherwise?

I realize I'm going outside the context of the discussion here, but just wanted to comment on this.

> a language which inherently uses many lines to express an action is a language which inherently expresses little per line

Depends on what you an action is. It's nice working in a language where each thing does one thing and one thing only. A single line that does numerous things at once can get pretty crazy, with magical processes spreading pixie dust over your data.

OK OK - edited: Rubyists are very stringent about syntax style, and there are styles WRT to C# but I'm not altogether aware of how you would accomplish the same things that I set out to do.

Specifically: a null check.

Personally I like the andand gem for this..

my_variable.andand.do_whatever

Reply on news.ycombinator.com