LINQ is so fucking useful and well designed feature of .NET ecosystem that it is unreal when you gotta use lang which doesnt have such a thing.
C# design team is/was unparalleled
replies(7):
C# design team is/was unparalleled
This is really the thing with the entire .NET stack that’s very hard to communicate. The standard library and framework design are so well thought out relative to anything else out there. More than that, the support within VS is beyond any other dev tool that exists for any other language - it’s not even particularly close. Edit-and-continue comes to mind, which despite how many times people confuse the two is not hot reload, and is wildly more productive and useful.
I remember back close to 20 years ago DHH was espousing Ruby/Rails and that the concept of types at all were a code smell, and thinking “you’re just very wrong, and clearly aren’t familiar with what else is out there”. Eventually a lot of that crowd moved to Node, then to typescript, and came around.
VS Enterprise (expensive as it is) had features 15 years ago that still seem magical when I show them to JS/TS folks now. IntelliTrace is one that comes to mind - there’s nothing remotely close to it’s snapshot debugging that I’ve seen anywhere else, and I’ve really looked.
The big problems with the ecosystem are that the docs are exhaustive but terribly boring, and not well explained from a learning-something-for-the-first-time perspective. They also really expect that everything you do is the Microsoft way, so if you’re trying to interface your code with something like an Avalonia UI, you’re on your own.
The language is absolutely wonderful though, even when used with Rider. The productivity relative to node/typescript is better enough that it crushes my soul having to go back to wrestling tsconfig and imports after working with .NET references for even small changes. So many of the little things I used to take for granted really just work, and work well. It’s just a wonderful piece of work executed over decades, held back by poor community outreach and badly written documentation.