Comment by rf15
14 hours ago
How .net got so many things right where java did not is a mystery to me, but appreciated (it has its own flaws, of course). Java, in my understanding, is still of core relevance to Oracle, and tied into a lot of contracts that require very little effort from them to maintain. But you are correct in observing that they want to be a datacentre/compute business more and more these days; they may have in fact overcomitted to this due to the AI craze, since shareholders are already complaining.
> How .net got so many things right where java did not is a mystery to me
Part of the reason for that is that Java is older. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C_Sharp_(programming_language)...:
“In interviews and technical papers, he has stated that flaws in most major programming languages (e.g. C++, Java, Delphi, and Smalltalk) drove the fundamentals of the Common Language Runtime (CLR), which, in turn, drove the design of the C# language.”
Also, some of Java’s design warts may be there because Java was initially envisioned for much smaller devices.
This. C# was basically always meant to be "Java but done right". It came several years later, after Microsoft was legally barred from "EEE"-ing Java and required a direct competitor.
> It came several years later, after Microsoft was legally barred
That is an eloquent way of re-writing the history of Microsoft stealing Java and not being allowed to get away with it.
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But what I don’t get reading the original article is that they present how to insert struct in an object oriented language as an intractable problem, whereas a good implementation with .net (as far as I can tell) has been out there for nearly 30 years. And C# was shameless about stealing from other languages.
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Ironically, they still do need Java for Azure, https://devblogs.microsoft.com/java
It's no mystery. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anders_Hejlsberg
Which recently decided that Go was a better option than C# for the Typescript rewrite, exactly because not all decisions were done correctly to make C# a better fit for the problem.
Go was chosen mainly because it aligned more with how the existing compiler is designed. They did not want to redesign the compiler which eliminated C# as a choice. So Go is apparently just a better fit for quickly porting JavaScript code to.
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The mystery of why .NET got so many things right is simply that C# was built several years later by the exact same Microsoft engineers who had previously worked on extending Java, giving them a perfect blank slate to fix the architectural flaws they had already encountered
Second mover advantage.
virtual thread instead of async/await is a counter example.
Java is more used than C#, they can wait before delivering a new feature (given their leader position) but cannot deliver a flawed implementation that would stay in the language forever. Glad to have virtual threads and the backward compatibility that comes with it instead a Async version of sync methods + async and await keywords all over the code and Task as a return type in my interfaces methods to allow implementations to do non blocking I/O calls if they need.
I use Java and C# and appreciate them both.
C# did not ship with async/await, and Java didn't have virtual threads back then. I am specifically referring to the initial choices made in C#'s foundation.
> giving them a perfect blank slate to fix the architectural flaws they had already encountered
and then they make everything nullable by default in c#...