Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

A glimpse into a new programming language under development at Microsoft

lambda-the-ultimate.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

111–120 of 230 posts

Re: A glimpse into a new programming language under development at Microsoft

#111

Post by laureny »

I am quite disturbed by this claim:

> It’s commonly claimed that with type-safety comes an inherent loss of performance

If we've learned anything, it's that type safety buys you performance because it enables a lot of compiler optimizations that are not possible in dynamically typed languages.

Other than that, the language sounds very interesting but if it's going to be Windows only, it will suffer the same fate as C#: powerful but crippled by its platform boundaries in a way that will make it impossible to compete with Java.

Re: A glimpse into a new programming language under development at Microsoft

#112

Post by ezico »

moomin wrote: post #31

This is going to be horribly negative so a bit of context first: I'm a professional C# programmer. I love C#, I think it's a great language. But there's a huge downside: C# only works on Windows. This vastly reduces the number of things you can do with it (yeah, I know about Mono). There's nothing here that suggests that this would have anything other than the same restrictions. So, assuming the language develops int…

I miss the HN of old where there were hardcore technical discussions about the merits and demerits of the technical approaches in such posts. Here we have almost none of those and instead there is lot of horse beating about aspects that are not even announced yet, taking sides in big tech politics etc which dominated and then killed Slashdot. I guess I must be getting too old for HN and the marked shift in the audience.

Re: A glimpse into a new programming language under development at Microsoft

#113

Post by tomjakubowski »

_random_ wrote: post #86
ben_hall wrote: post #51

C# might be a great language now, but 1.0 was horrible! It was a painful experience to gain adoption within companies and frameworks on top of it (ASP+ for example) still needed to mature. The world is different now. I predict Microsoft will push NodeJS / JavaScript / HTML5 for application development. I'm assuming this will be targeted towards the Go style community and applications. It has a lot of the same propert…

"NodeJS / JavaScript / HTML5" - more likely to be just another option to satisfy everyone. I would rather move to Scala than use JS for anything other than rich GUI. Who wants to support business logic implemented in JS by an average developer?

Why give up Scala when you're writing code for the browser? https://github.com/scala-js/scala-js

Re: A glimpse into a new programming language under development at Microsoft

#114

Post by sjs1234 »

moomin wrote: post #31

This is going to be horribly negative so a bit of context first: I'm a professional C# programmer. I love C#, I think it's a great language. But there's a huge downside: C# only works on Windows. This vastly reduces the number of things you can do with it (yeah, I know about Mono). There's nothing here that suggests that this would have anything other than the same restrictions. So, assuming the language develops int…

It is a systems language. The competitors are c, c++, go, and D. Within Microsoft it's just c and c++. Competition with Java is irrelevant, c# already occupies that space. Microsoft has enough need and scale that a systems language that picks up internal use is justified. The use case is making platforms, not crossing them.

Re: A glimpse into a new programming language under development at Microsoft

#115

Post by grandeb »

moomin wrote: post #31

This is going to be horribly negative so a bit of context first: I'm a professional C# programmer. I love C#, I think it's a great language. But there's a huge downside: C# only works on Windows. This vastly reduces the number of things you can do with it (yeah, I know about Mono). There's nothing here that suggests that this would have anything other than the same restrictions. So, assuming the language develops int…

I miss the HN of old where there were hardcore technical discussions about the merits and demerits of the technical approaches in such posts. Here we have almost none of those and instead there is lot of horse beating about aspects that are not even announced yet, taking sides in big tech politics etc, especially in upvoted comments, a trend which I previously noticed slowly dominated and then killed Slashdot. I guess I must be getting too old for HN and the marked shift in the audience.

Re: A glimpse into a new programming language under development at Microsoft

#116

Post by pswenson »

hhariri wrote: post #53
romanovcode wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

C# developer here, also love the language. I completely agree and I only hope that this new thing will be just as good as C# but fully cross-platform. It would be great. >mobile Xamarin is pretty solid, although it costs a lot.

You looked at Kotlin? As a C# developer I'm loving the language and it is x-platform. And that's despite my assumed bias, because I work at JetBrains.

kotlin looks cool. But it's missing some minor things that would make it much more friendly:

* no regex literals

* a little verbose(instead of [] for arrays, it's "Arrays")

* hashes IMO should be JSON

* why doesn't null evaluate to false? God I hate writing if (a != null). I'm much happier in javascript/ruby/groovy land where if can type "if (!a)" or "unless a" or even cooler "raise Exception("a should not be null") unless a"

* why did the world standardize on camelCase instead of snake_case ? the world was wrong about this!

basically a little more javascript and ruby influence would have been good. make the language more "fun" and expressive. There is no equiv of the ||= operator or | for joining arrays, etc

But the big things it's missing are more ecosystem features: * REPL

* an alternative build system (please don't make anyone use maven!) should be an interpreted scripting language. I'd look at Rake or Gradle for inspiration

* rails like web framework

Re: A glimpse into a new programming language under development at Microsoft

#118

Post by edwinnathaniel »

catnaroek wrote: post #92
moomin wrote: post #31

This is going to be horribly negative so a bit of context first: I'm a professional C# programmer. I love C#, I think it's a great language. But there's a huge downside: C# only works on Windows. This vastly reduces the number of things you can do with it (yeah, I know about Mono). There's nothing here that suggests that this would have anything other than the same restrictions. So, assuming the language develops int…

> But there's a huge downside: C# only works on Windows. Not true. And, even if it were, how is that in any way a downside from Microsoft's point of view? As a Linux user myself, the main reason why I switched from Windows is that all the exciting advances in programming languages are happening in * nix-land, mainly Haskell and Rust. If there were some super-duper-awesome language for which Windows were the first-cla…

Some of the .net libraries only run on Windows CLR. Example: DotNetOauth. Many other people pointed out other libs as well.

Kick-ass language with poor ecosystem is the common symptoms of academic language: for fun but lack of productivity and not battle tested.

Re: A glimpse into a new programming language under development at Microsoft

#119

Post by brandonbloom »

laureny wrote: post #111

I am quite disturbed by this claim: > It’s commonly claimed that with type-safety comes an inherent loss of performance If we've learned anything, it's that type safety buys you performance because it enables a lot of compiler optimizations that are not possible in dynamically typed languages. Other than that, the language sounds very interesting but if it's going to be Windows only, it will suffer the same fate as C…

I assumed he meant safety in the general sense or memory safety specifically. Things like array bounds checks, dynamic cast failures throwing exceptions, etc.

Re: A glimpse into a new programming language under development at Microsoft

#120

Post by sergiotapia »

grandeb wrote: post #115
moomin wrote: post #31

This is going to be horribly negative so a bit of context first: I'm a professional C# programmer. I love C#, I think it's a great language. But there's a huge downside: C# only works on Windows. This vastly reduces the number of things you can do with it (yeah, I know about Mono). There's nothing here that suggests that this would have anything other than the same restrictions. So, assuming the language develops int…

I miss the HN of old where there were hardcore technical discussions about the merits and demerits of the technical approaches in such posts. Here we have almost none of those and instead there is lot of horse beating about aspects that are not even announced yet, taking sides in big tech politics etc, especially in upvoted comments, a trend which I previously noticed slowly dominated and then killed Slashdot. I gues…

For what it's worth if I'm getting voted up in my comments, I take it as a sign that HN is declining.
Post reply on HN