Comments on: C# Dynamic: The Downfall of Western Civilization

By: Tom

Tom — Thu, 12 Nov 2009 10:25:57 +0000

All this will really do is allow even worse programmers to write silly applications that will break in slightly different situations.
For the people who actually know what they’re doing this can be a really nice feature

By: Matt

Matt — Wed, 11 Nov 2009 21:27:55 +0000

> Just tell the abusers, in a friendly way, how to code better.

sadly, there are two flaws with this
(1) programmers are often quite independently minded people
(2) your first contact with other peoples code is normally at the point its too late for your advice to help

there is a natural trade off between language feature ‘power’ and how readable (or open to abuse) the resulting code is. Java has the interesting property that bad programmers will toil for a long time writing very verbose code that can normally easily be unpicked and discarded. C# features like true function types and maybe the dynamic keyword are likely to make this more difficult.

Many useful code navigation and alteration tools will not work with dynamic types, so I’m also in the camp that assumes this will maybe do more harm than good.

By: Paco

Paco — Wed, 11 Nov 2009 20:55:24 +0000

As any new language feature, it will be abused. This does not mean languages should not evolve. A bad thing about language abuse and C# is that the new features will not be abused by “Corporate America”, but also by microsoft employees. An example of language abuse in C#3 is the use of anonymous types for things like routeconfiguration in asp.net mvc. How do we stop this: Just tell the abusers on a friendly way how to code better.

By: Gigi

Gigi — Wed, 11 Nov 2009 20:54:01 +0000

And then you’ll switch to Python. Zi Horror. NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO

By: Chris

Chris — Wed, 11 Nov 2009 20:52:04 +0000

It will be no worse than various other dynamic languages, none of which have caused the downfall of western civilization *yet*.