in reply to Spoiled by Perl

An appreciation of C# is helped by remembering the turbulent political era during which it was born. At least, during the 1990s, I felt depressed and disgusted by the outrageously expensive legal battles erupting between big software corporations, such as Sun Microsystems, Microsoft, Apple and Oracle. This constant childish corporate bickering drove me away from the Java and C# desert ... into a refreshing oasis of more open technologies, such as Linux, C, C++, Python, Ruby and ... Perl! :)

In the late 1990s for example:

Sun filed this suit for copyright infringement, claiming that Microsoft had exceeded the scope of its license by creating an enhanced version of Java that was fully operable only on Microsoft's operating system...

These relentless ongoing expensive Java legal battles with Sun drove Microsoft to pour millions into developing its own Java-killer, namely the C# Programming Language and .NET Framework (see also .NET and Mono).

Things got much worse for Java after Oracle Corporation acquired Sun Microsystems in 2010. Though Oracle didn't set the bar very high as the new custodian of Java, Microsoft did a much better job as custodian of the C# programming language (even embracing open source).

At least that's my take on why C# has steadily, relentlessly become a better technology than Java over the years. Oh, and hiring and keeping an accomplished language designer certainly helped -- by contrast, Gosling quit in disgust after Oracle acquired Sun.

I get a bit annoyed when people compare C# to C++ rather than Java. Of course, Microsoft themselves did that (presumably for both marketing and legal reasons) but to my eye C# is much closer to Java than C++.

At least that's my take on the history. Corrections welcome.

At work, we used Java in the early days, but gradually migrated to C# over the years. I don't think there's much Java left nowadays - though Groovy remains popular for DevOps work, notably with Jenkins.

Though I've mostly been successful at avoiding C#, it seems a pretty nice language to me - certainly it has plenty of fans at work (as noted at Five Ways to Reverse a String of Words (C#, Perl 5, Perl 6, Ruby, Haskell)).

I boldly predict C# will eventually overtake Java on tiobe. I remember the heady days when Java was top of this list ... hmmm, perhaps all the corporate bickering between Java and C# over the years helped propel Python to the top of tiobe today! :)

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Re^2: Spoiled by Perl (JVM/CLR)
by eyepopslikeamosquito (Archbishop) on Nov 02, 2021 at 07:59 UTC
[reply]

      ActiveState used to have tools that allowed you to integrate Perl and CLR based stull. The Perl itself was running using its own engine, but you could call one from the other. It makes more sense to do it that way anyway. CLR was not designed for dynamic languages.

      Jenda
      1984 was supposed to be a warning,
      not a manual!

[reply]
Re^2: Spoiled by Perl
by LanX (Saint) on Oct 31, 2021 at 11:50 UTC
    Thanks for the informative overview ...

    > claiming that Microsoft had exceeded the scope of its license by creating an enhanced version of Java that was fully operable only on Microsoft's operating system

    So same strategy like with JScript / IE to kill/steal the main project. Just that the story here led to ECMAScript.

    Cheers Rolf
    (addicted to the Perl Programming Language :)
    Wikisyntax for the Monastery

[reply]

      And sometimes good things simply vanish. I sadly remember this stuff which was my favorite waste of time as well as my cashcow for some years.

      «The Crux of the Biscuit is the Apostrophe»

[reply]

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