tkellogg

You're right. But honestly I'd like to see these improvements trickle down to Mono. There's 2 things big things that combined could change this trend - (1) performance enhancements like this for Mono and (2) a lot of work being done on MonoDevelop.

I've been doing my part to work on #2. I've sent in some improvements to VI mode (https://github.com/mono/monodevelop/pull/247) because I think it's critical to convince myself to work in MD. It also needs a lot of work on the debugger end. If we can successfully get people to work on Linux, C# might actually become prevalent.

Maybe you should be using C#. As a community we fight hard to reject xml configuration, favoring type safe lambda expressions instead. Anything that ignores the type safe guarantees that C# offers quickly does. There was briefly a spring.net but it quickly died for this reason.

The reason for my stern words is that there are crashing bugs that have caused us a lot of headaches. For one, if something goes wrong during serialization/deserization, the response crashes and no status code or error message is returned. So aside from the trademark Microsoft unintelligible design, you also have to deal with crashing bugs that won't be fixed for years, if ever.

> reasonable maturity of WCF

Being a user of WCF, I'm sorry to say, it's terrible. Don't ever make the mistake of thinking WCF is fit for production.

This goes for pretty much the whole C#/.NET ecosystem. The Microsoft tools are severely lacking in good design principles and the open source tools are amazing and life changing but don't have the mindshare to be revolutionary. This is mostly just a fact of Microsoft being unfit for open source workflows.

Instead of WCF, try ServiceStack (or SignalR if it makes sense). Instead of ASP.NET MVC, try NancyFx or FubuMVC.

> If you want a better job, do your current job better. It will get noticed, and that's how you advance.

This has not been my experience. If it were true, I'd be the lead architect. I think politics are more important. It's not simply good enough to do your job well - you have to make sure everyone sees you doing your job well. In fact, you don't even need to do your job well to get ahead, you just have to step out a few critical times and make sure people see you doing a good thing. Hoping that you get noticed is, in my experience, the worst advice you can give.

Bobble, you've hit on the core problem. While most, if not all, mass murders involved a mentally unstable perpetrator, being mentally unstable has nothing to do with being too incompetent to kill lots of people. In fact, many of the mass murderers that the US has seen over the last decade were very intelligent individuals.

Also, ex-military are (probably) statistically more unstable than the average citizen due to conditions like PTSD. Keeping dangerous weapons out of the hands of the mentally unfit is a really complex problem to solve without either trampling over rights altogether (frequent invasive psych evals that have the potential of being biased or politically charged) or banning them altogether.

Banning these weapons altogether isn't a good solution (sorry Obama) because too much of America considers them a core part of their society and have shown that they really are mostly safe, historically speaking. However, I think there's enough evidence that the trend is shifting toward guns being statistically more dangerous than they used to be. Even if that evidence doesn't exist, there is a public perception that needs to be addressed. This is a problem with politics in general - if there's a public outcry against _X_, you have to ban or regulate _X_, even if there's no statistics to validate the public outcry; politicians have a need to be reelected (or in the case of a 2nd term president, the need to maintain a legacy or to get another Democrat voted into office after his term is up).

This article tries to walk a line somewhere between "ban guns entirely" and "give everyone a gun". I admit, there's a ton of problems with almost all parts of it (and yes, I am the author). But it is an attempt to invent a compromise that could add to society (by strengthening the police/protection agencies) instead of take away (ban guns, cultural norms) while still addressing the problem.

If you've been following Congress in recent years like I have you've probably become sick at what their idea a compromise has become. It seems like the Congressional culture has shifted toward a self-serving Armageddon between Good and Evil. Obviously that's a much (much much much) bigger problem that I want to address here, but introducing constructive compromises where both parties gain is where it starts.

Yes, I think this has gains for both sides. The "Gun people" also tend to be pro-military, so we're letting both sides "win" by giving enlisted and veterans some rights that are not widely available to the general public. Honestly, I don't think it's possible to have either side "win". I can't think of a way to address public concerns without taking things away. If someone can think of a way, please tell them to write to their Congressmen immediately.

They say that "guns protect us". How do they protect us? Is a bystander supposed to lift up their shirt, revealing a gun tucked into their waist, forcing the bank robbers to run away? I think the NRA and Republican party have already assumed that they're instructing the general public to kill, or at least wound, on behalf of public safety.

That is in fact the logic of the the pro-gun party. Since politics is about compromise, might as well run with it...

> For the most part a short downtime isn't the end of the world

Unless the Mayans were off by one

You forgot to read all the text you just copied:

    "we mention this not because our language design is focused on performance, but merely to point out that heavy use of reference immutability, ...has not come at the cost of performance in the experience of the Microsoft team."

Stop trolling

I'm still not sure where you read that mutable state is impossible in FP. If you don't mind me quoting, I believe it says:

    "In most FP languages, variables are declared immutable by default."

That doesn't sound like a claim that mutable state is impossible. Perhaps we should spend more time reading and less time criticizing...

Great points. I recommend actually reading the paper behind the blog post (http://research.microsoft.com/pubs/170528/msr-tr-2012-79.pdf). I guarantee it'll blow your mind how well the system works. It's much more compete than you imagined.

I'm not even sure why that's necessary. If you need a block of performant code, use unsafe C# (no array bounds checking, unmanaged pointers, etc). Otherwise, C# runs pretty fast the way it is.

The genius of Linq is that it makes parallels between SQL and parts of functional programming. A lot of .NET devs have grown up using SQL and aren't looking to make changes. Instead of forcing devs to do functional programming, they made FP look familiar (like SQL). It's easy to explain a Linq statement to mediocre developers. For those of us who aren't mediocre, this makes a pleasant world where we can plunge further into FP without worrying about mediocre coworkers falling too far behind.

Wow, this is the worst article I've seen on hacker news front page in a very long time.

C# has a tremendous potential for functional programming. There's some features that make a pure functional style easier and prettier in haskell, but C# has plenty of potential.

The title is total link bait. I clicked because I know there are things to write about - like pervasive nulls and mutable-by-default variables to begin with. There really are things to complain about! But the actual contents of the article are infuriatingly obtuse.

The fact that 39 people found this interesting in 2012 just demonstrates how ineffective the entire hacker news concept really is.

I think this article is great. However, I think you should spend a little more time (like your last comment) describing why this is important; make it obvious why people should appreciate your work. I, for one, wish I was better at memory management since I spend most of my time in managed C# (and other languages with memory management). For your next post, spend a little more time spelling out the details for why each step is important: what is gained by not copying _this_ memory? Compare the memory usage profile of the managed vs. unmanaged algorithms. Explain the constraints of the GC (and perhaps some history). Many people assume the GC will always do a better job at managing memory than they can, so explain the corner cases for when that's not true.

When "the list of parameters gets unweildy" and "I want multiple returns" are to major indicators that you got some anti-patterns going on. I think the refactoring that you need might a new class with a single responsibility.

I can't find anything that even remotely says "Web development requires static type checking".

A friend passed me this article. Despite that it has some serious holes, it also has some serious truth to be reckoned with. Sure, if you learn the fundamentals you can keep your skills from going stale. But statistics indicate that it's probably more of a fantasy than true. I'm pretty young, and I can carry far more credibility with older colleagues than if I was in a different profession. I also can name numerous past colleagues that worked the programming field for decades and carry absolutely no credibility. Personal experience says that this link is not garbage.

Funny, I just ran into Hammock-driven development for the first time on Friday. I like the principle even if this wasn't presented the best.

You can do this at github too. Really confused me the first time I saw a commit referenced for a user that didn't have the commit yet...

I usually reject pull requests with no tests. For one, tests often do a better job describing what the pull request is for than the actual description. Also, it's easier if they think through all the corner cases. It's true, it makes a bigger barrier to entry. But on the other hand, it also gives more value to the contributions. But maybe I should rethink my stance...

I promise I'll publicize the results. I just need to get an objective measurement of what's real versus what everyone thinks is real.

Yeah a directory would be great.there's so many projects that do great work but need help. Maybe there should be an app for that :)

If you think that most HN readers contribute to open source regularly then yes. I have a feeling though that many don't, despite appearances. Really I'd like that blog post to be a gateway for devs to get involved. I'm from the .NET community where there's way too little contribution. If you give to open source projects, good for you! Now go and get your friends involved too.

Deep down inside he's probably scared that Stackoverflow users also roam Hacker News & the Internet at large and doesn't want his blog post to become a honeypot for scorn. Honestly, I understand completely where he's coming from. I've posted answers to SO and received lots of "well that's obviously wrong" kind of comments - it took me months to realize what was so wrong about those answers (why couldn't they just tell me). The SO crowd can be extremely purist & hostile. But I suppose that's what drives quality in their answers.

it reminds me of waiting for gogot

Funny, I actually cloned this repo last night to contribute. I really want to contribute because it's so useful and @jaredpar seems to be doing a shit ton of work all by himself. But the whole F# part is going to be a hurdle.

Yeah, I also learned about the -i] commands. Can't believe I didn't know about them before...

It's one of those things where you get excited that there's something so accurate, but also a little fearful of how management could use it to incent badly written code.