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Comment by mdemare | Hacker News Reader

This isn't Java, this is C#. (In Java this would be more verbose).

I'm aware of that. I chose to pick on Java because I assume, perhaps too generously, that the C# designers are constrained by the need to market their language to Java developers, such that when Java heads over a cliff the C# folks are obliged to follow, though perhaps with a more elegant series of aerial stunts on the way down.

The risk is that I unfairly maligned Java, a language which I do not know well anymore, since I abandoned it about when it started to look like this. But according to you I'm being too generous to them as well. :)

>the C# designers are constrained by the need to market their language to Java developers

that was true only up to about C# 2.0; Java is way, way behind nowadays.

> C# designers are constrained by the need to market their language to Java developers

No, because C# had generics before Java.

Oops. My ire is misplaced, then.

Well, the C# 2.0 specification was written in 2002, but the compiler was only released in 2005, a year after Sun released J2SE 5.0. So from a implementation perspective, Java had generics before C#.

I'm not sure if C#/Java's type-safety has morphed into a ridiculous version of itself. I suspect that there has been too little, rather than too much development in this regard. Type-inference and typedefs would go a long way of solving the excesses of type-safety, certainly in this case.

Java has no type safety, since every object can be null, and methods can't be called on null. This means your program can blow up at runtime due to type errors.

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