Title: The Wall

James,

Francis' comments on C# in the "Francis' Scribbles" section were right on the mark.

I think it can be difficult to assess new technology from Microsoft in an objective manner, without getting distracted by issues such as Microsoft's domination of the industry and whether it has pinched ideas from others or not. I think if Java did not exist and Microsoft came up with .NET most commentators would have hailed it as great.

Of course, it's unlikely that Microsoft would have come up with something quite like .NET without the existence of Java. But, nevertheless, we can still assess .NET on its objective technical merits - ignoring whether it's copied from others or not.

In any case, no technology exists in a vacuum and everything has been influenced by something else to some degree.

C# has clearly been heavily influenced by Java. But on closer examination you can see that it has also been influenced by C++, Visual Basic and Delphi. And it is closer to C++ than Java is to C++.

I think it's been carefully thought out, which is not to say that some things couldn't be better. But that applies to all languages.

Re: Francis' remarks about knowing more than one language, I agree. Even if you don't use more than one language you should definitely study several. I've found that concepts encountered in other languages, such as Eiffel, have enabled me to improve my programming in other languages such as C++. Different languages have different idioms and learning about these, both when they can be transferred and when not, improves our usage of our primary language(s).

Kevin McFarlane