This content originally appeared on DEV Community and was authored by Cesar Aguirre
I originally posted this post on my blog a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away.
C# isn't just Java anymore.
That might have been true for the early days of C#. But the two languages took different paths.
People making that joke have missed at least the last ten years of C# history.
C# is open source and in constant evolution. In fact, you can upvote and discuss feature proposals in the C# official GitHub repo.
Every .NET release comes with new C# features.
But I've stopped obsessing over new C# features. In fact, I stopped collecting my favorite C# features by version. I feel I'm not missing much.
C# is not a consistent language anymore. We now have many alternatives for the same task.
Since I don't want this post to be only a rant, here are three new C# features introduced in recent versions. I have a love-and-hate relationship with these next three features.
Objects, Arrays, and Null
First, here's how to create a new object,
Movie m = new Movie("Titanic");
var m = new Movie("Titanic");
Movie m = new("Titanic");
// 👆👆
The last one is the target-typed "new" expressions introduced in C# 9.0. I'm not quite sure if I like this feature or not. While I make my mind, that's one of the features I disable in a .editorconfig file.
Second, here's how to declare and initialize an array,
Movie[] movies = new Movie[] { new Movie("Titanic") };
var movies = new Movie[] { new Movie("Titanic") };
var movies = new Movie[] { new("Titanic") };
// 👆👆
var movies = new[] { new Movie("Titanic") };
// 👆👆
Movie[] movies = [ new Movie("Titanic") ];
// 👆
Movie[] movies = [ new("Titanic") ];
We combine "new" expressions and collection expressions introduced in C# 12.
And, lastly, here's how to check if an object is not null,
var titanic = new Movie("Titanic")
titanic != null;
titanic is not null;
titanic is {};
titanic is object;
The first option is the old one. The classic one. The other three are thanks to pattern matching.
And I don't want to touch on primary constructors. It's like classes got jealous of records and started crying for a similar feature, like a baby boy jealous of his brother.
Voilà! That's what I don't like about C#. Don't take me wrong, C# is a great language with excellent tooling. But my favorite features are old: LINQ, async/await, and extension methods.
Some new features have lowered the barrier to entry. Now a "Hello, world" is a single line of code: Console.WriteLine("Hello, world!");.
Other C# features are making the language inconsistent and easier to write but not easier to read.
Often C# doesn't feel like a single language, but three: the classic one from the early 2000s, another one between the classic and the .NET era, and the one we're living these days.
Anyway, still no discriminated unions. Maybe in C# 20?
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Happy coding!
This content originally appeared on DEV Community and was authored by Cesar Aguirre
Cesar Aguirre | Sciencx (2024-07-29T05:00:00+00:00) My Least Favorite Part of C# Evolution: Inconsistency. Retrieved from https://www.scien.cx/2024/07/29/my-least-favorite-part-of-c-evolution-inconsistency/
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