Why C# is the best language for mobile development

As many pointed out when that story came out, that datapoint is highly suspicious. There are plenty of smaller languages that have surely grown much more than that (it's easier to grow more when you are small).

Also, the actual popularity is what really matters, not the increase. If C# increased 2.3% from 1000 to 1023, but say Java was at 1,000,000 and stayed there at 0% growth, then the conclusion is obvious. (Not saying those are the numbers, the point is that actual popularity trumps a few percent of growth in a year.)

> What accounts for the growth of C# in 2012? Well, the launch of Windows 8 has probably played a role — C# remains the dominant language of third-party application development on Windows devices.

Doubtful. Windows 8's launch has been a failure, even compared to Vista according to the latest figures. And is C# even the "dominant language" for Windows 8? It seems JavaScript might be just as important if not more so for Metro apps.

I put about as much effort into my critique as the original article's author did in arguing for C#'s superiority.

> I like Objective-C, but objectively speaking, Objective-C is horrible for type-safety. The id type is used in a lot of places (e.g. every collection class), and you can magically convert anything to anything else without a peep from the compiler through the id type. There is no easy way to say "This is an array of Foo" and have that checked.

This is a problem that has bit me in the ass maybe once or twice since I started developing in Obj-C several years ago. You could magically cast things to whatever you wanted in C++, and that was never a serious problem for me back when I was developing in C++ either. As an avid JavaScript developer as well, I've had no problem with a lack of type safety. It's just not the huge demon (for me) that it's made out to be - at least in my experience.

> They might have some platform-specific code, but having a common, portable base is hardly a pipe dream.

70% code reuse across iOS and Android (see http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4998661) is hardly what I'd call "portable". Does the Bash shell do better than 70% code reuse across Linux / BSD / etc? I certainly hope it does.

Neither C# itself nor the OP's article sell C# as being a prime language for functional, dynamic, or systems programming. Rather, it has inherited some convenient little bits of each paradigm to make the language that much nicer to write.

For example, don't want to redeclare that "List>" you're copying over because it has a scope of 2 lines? Just dynamically type it by calling it a "var" and be done with it. Boom: Cleaner code and zero performance hit because the compiler infers the type such that the resulting IL is identical at runtime.

Sure, given features can be misused to produce ugly or "unsatisfying" code, but that's true of any language and is ultimately the programmer's fault. Just because said features are provided, doesn't mean you need to use them. You should ultimately be using the right tool for the job, after all. C# gives you the power of having a wider choice of tools, and I love it.

Not really. He stated an actual fact: Proper garbage collection allows for simpler memory management than retain counting. I agree that he didn't do enough to illustrate this, but he did go further than just "I like this thing." It is indeed true that there are a number of awkward situations where you can end up with immortalized objects with retain counting that would not have been so under garbage collection (see for example the "__block id uglyHack = self" idiom in Objective-C).

> 70% code reuse across iOS and Android (see http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4998661) is hardly what I'd call "portable". Does the Bash shell do better than 70% code reuse across Linux / BSD / etc? I certainly hope it does.

I would rather rewrite 30% of my code than 100%. If you want to say it's imperfect and could be better, that's fine, but dismissing it entirely seems unreasonable to me.