Comment by breadwinner
1 day ago
> Like engineers in that community look down on not using the latest features?
Yes. Engineers use the latest features heavily to demonstrate that their skills are current.
One of the worst such features is "var". Some tools even flag your code for not using var when you could. Inappropriate use of "var" makes code harder to read (and even MS documentation says this) and makes code slightly less reliable too.
Ok but var has been around since C# 3.0 in 2007. Love it or hate it, using that keyword in 2025 signals nothing about how current your skills are.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C_Sharp_3.0#Local_variable_typ...
You are right about this not being a new feature. But if you don't use it, it seems like you haven't updated your skills in a while.
Besides making the code harder to read, "var" also makes your code less reliable as seen in this example: https://circles.page/567f44465c28b00bf8ed6cf9/Csharp-Type-In...
SomeMethod().Fire(); has the same "problem". var e = new Employee(); does not.
The problem you see is independent from var.
4 replies →
from your sibling comment: > "var" also makes your code less reliable as seen in this example
I disagree with this too, I think your example is a classic case of preprocessor directives making it difficult to know what your code is doing because the build system is going to conditionally change your code. Var or not, you can't even know what's being compiled just by looking at the file, and that's a larger problem than the use of var
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/csharp/language-ref...
Use of preprocessor in the example is incidental. The problem with var is that you're not completely stating your intent, leaving it to the compiler to infer your intent. This can lead to trouble in some cases.
I have seen code that sorts numbers as strings, because nowhere in the code was the intent stated that the array is supposed to hold numbers. As a result, if the programmer forgot to convert strings to integers at input time, the bug is never caught.
See: https://circles.page/567f44465c28b00bf8ed6cf9/Csharp-type-in...