We See Sharp So You Don’t Have To C#

With all due respect to people who collect garbage for a living, I do not want to be a garbage collector. Moving from the Magic xpa application platform to a C# pile of code is like moving from a beautiful mansion to a garbage dump.

The frustration of programming in C# is that you spend so much of your time doing unpleasant things, like garbage collection,  that you are forced to spend less time on your real applications, more overtime evening and weekend hours working on non-productive code, or both. I don’t make this stuff up, folks. Microsoft’s “Conclusion” is very clear: “The .NET garbage collector provides a high-speed allocation service with good use of memory and no long-term fragmentation problems, however it is possible to do things that will give you much less than optimal performance.” In other words, stepping into a C# programming project means you are entering a highly risky world where you can easily spend excessive amounts of effort and end up with extremely poor performance.

C# is Microsoft’s archaic imitation of Java. We all know Java is an overly complex, bloated pile of code as well, but in C# Microsoft managed to release a language that is very poorly suited to today’s business challenges. Let’s be clear, C# is not a cross-platform mobile language. Depending on kluges like Mono, is a highly risky business strategy for creating mobile apps because the future of these approaches is highly uncertain. Mono recently had to get another $12 million to stay afloat and there is no indication that they have a strategy that will stabilize their rocky history.

C# is dependent on APIs in extension libraries. If you are only ever going to program for today’s requirements, this may be fine. But what happens when you need to run your code somewhere other than Windows? Let’s be clear, C# is not a platform and it is not cross-platform. If you depend on API extension libraries, you are inviting yourself into a development dead-end.

Maintaining C# code is extremely difficult, especially when you are trying to work with someone else’s code. For example, a section of code can look exactly the same but behave differently depending on whether it is actually a class or a struct. I get nightmares just thinking about it.

An application platform provides a world of benefits and saves you from a world of hurt. At Magic, we see sharp so you don’t have to C#.