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Why C# is the best language for mobile development

blog.xamarin.com

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Re: Why C# is the best language for mobile development

#11

Post by joelangeway »

corresation wrote: post #2

While a bit of an aside, personally I find LINQ to have been a horrendous misstep in the evolution of the language. While the argument that it makes code more concise and easy to maintain holds in the small, once a project grows it becomes a terrible cancer -- everything becomes an amorphous blob of stuff, unintuitive, performance-disaster LINQ filters applied everywhere to bend it into shape.

This is a fundamental place where the worlds of C# and Java differ. Where the Java world would say, "developers might misuse this, better not have it in the language," the C# world says, "developers could really use this, better put it in the language."

Re: Why C# is the best language for mobile development

#12

Post by taumeson »

corresation wrote: post #4
sourc3 wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, but it's not specific to LINQ or MS or C#. If you give a tool to mediocre developers to make things easier they will use it right away. If you don't supervise its usage (how it fits into the architectural goals of the project you are on) you will end up with a mess. Anonymous methods, unnamed classes, try catch blocks are all examples of these type of tools that when used improperly will kill the system performa…

Yes, but it's not specific to LINQ or MS or C# We are specifically talking about C#. LINQ was specifically held as one of the improvements to the language. I am not quite sure what your point is relative to that. There are shockingly few examples where LINQ is superior to alternatives. LINQ is the brute force technique of avoiding proper collections/algorithms.

The point is relevant in relation to the fact that you held LINQ out as a misstep, but the reasons you cite can be applied to many features of many different languages.

Re: Why C# is the best language for mobile development

#13

Post by meaty »

corresation wrote: post #2

While a bit of an aside, personally I find LINQ to have been a horrendous misstep in the evolution of the language. While the argument that it makes code more concise and easy to maintain holds in the small, once a project grows it becomes a terrible cancer -- everything becomes an amorphous blob of stuff, unintuitive, performance-disaster LINQ filters applied everywhere to bend it into shape.

This times a million. The amount of shit I have to deal with where people have used it in criminal ways is unreal.

Fine examples:

.ToList() materialization multiple times in a call graph. Ok so the thread is eating 200mb of ram?!?!?!

Generic method hell.

complete lack of understanding regarding IEnumerable, ICollection, IList etc.

O(log N) that doesn't go bang until you stick a production dataset in it.

The specification pattern - bottled rape is the only way I can quantify this. Sounds great until you have 2500 specifications and are stacking them 20 deep and your ORM decides it has had enough of clauses (EF4 bug).

My favourite: junior developer turns up and says "I wrote this awesome linq query - come and look!". Get there: all of the above.

Re: Why C# is the best language for mobile development

#14

Post by taumeson »

gjulianm wrote: post #5
corresation wrote: post #2

While a bit of an aside, personally I find LINQ to have been a horrendous misstep in the evolution of the language. While the argument that it makes code more concise and easy to maintain holds in the small, once a project grows it becomes a terrible cancer -- everything becomes an amorphous blob of stuff, unintuitive, performance-disaster LINQ filters applied everywhere to bend it into shape.

Could you give an example of that? Personally, I like LINQ a lot. I don't use it very much in my code (and usually it's for things like light filter or ordering), but it has these little things that save a lot of time.

Be careful what you ask for -- you have to admit that it is possible to create some horrendous "code" with Linq. Also I have a hunch that OP is thinking of L2S or Linq2Entities or somesuch.

Re: Why C# is the best language for mobile development

#15

Post by segphault »

RyanZAG wrote: post #7

Please don't actually do this - or if you do this, use the C# code only for the backend, and write the UI code natively for each platform. Nothing is worse than a 'not quire right' 'seems almost the same but isnt' UI.

One of the major advantages of Xamarin's approach is that the Xamarin frameworks expose access to all of the native APIs and standard user interface controls of the underlying platform. The apps are fully native, they are just written with C#.

(Disclosure: I work for Xamarin)

Re: Why C# is the best language for mobile development

#16

Post by danabramov »

RyanZAG wrote: post #7

Please don't actually do this - or if you do this, use the C# code only for the backend, and write the UI code natively for each platform. Nothing is worse than a 'not quire right' 'seems almost the same but isnt' UI.

If you have read the article, you would have known Xamarin products expose native iOS and Android APIs. MonoTouch apps feel exactly the same as UIKit apps because they are UIKit apps.

From my perspective, MonoTouch UIKit bindings are more convenient than original Objective C library because C# is nicer (think events, typed arrays and dictionaries, etc.)

Re: Why C# is the best language for mobile development

#17

Post by taumeson »

meaty wrote: post #13
corresation wrote: post #2

While a bit of an aside, personally I find LINQ to have been a horrendous misstep in the evolution of the language. While the argument that it makes code more concise and easy to maintain holds in the small, once a project grows it becomes a terrible cancer -- everything becomes an amorphous blob of stuff, unintuitive, performance-disaster LINQ filters applied everywhere to bend it into shape.

This times a million. The amount of shit I have to deal with where people have used it in criminal ways is unreal. Fine examples: .ToList() materialization multiple times in a call graph. Ok so the thread is eating 200mb of ram?!?!?! Generic method hell. complete lack of understanding regarding IEnumerable, ICollection, IList etc. O(log N) that doesn't go bang until you stick a production dataset in it. The specifica…

These are great concrete examples that are very Linq specific. I cringed reading a few of them. The .ToList() materialization can easily be avoided by using a little skill, but the realities of late binding that don't show up until you hit production -- this can catch anybody.

Re: Why C# is the best language for mobile development

#18

Post by natfriedman »

gte910h wrote: post #10

The vast majority of the code in most apps is not core code, it's display code. That's STILL entirely device specific. I think the C# advocates oversell how much it is reusable If you STARTED with a great pile of C# code, say, running on the desktop or server, then wanted to port that to an iOS device, then you have a point. One big problem with non-native code is that example code is almost always written in native…

That's actually not what we see with our customers and their apps.

Here is a real-world example of code sharing percentages for an iOS, Android, and Mac app written in C#: http://lipsky.me/blog/2012/9/11/touchdraw-code-reuse-updated

And here is another one across iOS, Android, Mac, and Windows, also in C#: http://praeclarum.org/post/31799384896/icircuit-code-reuse-t...

Both of these apps are using 100% _native widgets_ for their user interface, and I think it's fair to say that both of them are fairly UI-heavy. And yet they average >70% code sharing.

It should also be pointed out that these apps were written from scratch. In fact, Jon Lipsky didn't even know C# before he started writing TouchDraw (the first app I linked).

Re: Why C# is the best language for mobile development

#19

Post by gigantor »

corresation wrote: post #2

While a bit of an aside, personally I find LINQ to have been a horrendous misstep in the evolution of the language. While the argument that it makes code more concise and easy to maintain holds in the small, once a project grows it becomes a terrible cancer -- everything becomes an amorphous blob of stuff, unintuitive, performance-disaster LINQ filters applied everywhere to bend it into shape.

You don't even have to use LINQ at all with C#, it's an extension library and not one that needs to be referenced or is even included as a default namespace. LINQ is very convenient to use on in memory objects where there's no noticable performance hits. Even LINQ->SQL produces somewhat optimized SQL. How else would you bend data into shape without an ORM layer? Writing custom stored procedures, adding a whole bunch of new service methods, or manipulating data tables directly?

This 'cancer' is simply a data layer; if you use proper design patterns and seperate your layers correctly, you can surgically remove this tumour and replace it with another ORM.

Re: Why C# is the best language for mobile development

#20

Post by jordan0day »

As languages go, C# may be the ultimate "middle ground" because it really excels and providing a middling implementation of [your-favorite-language-feature].

That is, if you're a functional programming enthusiast, you can do a lot of functional programming in C#. Sure, it's often more painful than haskell or lisp or F#, but it's workable.

If you're a dynamic programming enthusiast, C# has a perfectly workable (but ultimately unsatisfying) implementation of dynamic.

Systems programmer? Mark your code as "unsafe" and twiddle bits to your hearts content! It's not as quick or necessarily easy as C, but it's there!

Even its' OOP, which is C#'s "official" paradigm, is probably disappointing to smalltalk guys, but hey, it's better than Java, right?!

It's not glamorous or flashy, it's a workhorse language. And at being a workhorse language, I'd say it really is one of "the best".

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