Apart from a huge education of the computer industry about C#, what are some of the challenges
faced by C# today?
I think there are two big challenges. The first is true to all .NET languages, and it's that
we require a runtime to be installed before our app is installed. That's not a big problem with
large apps, but it does make utilities a bit tougher to do right now. The second challenge is
more of an education one, there are still a large number of people who don't understand what
.NET and C# are, why we built them, and what the advantages of using them are.
C# has a huge potential. How do you personally see C# evolve in the near and far future?
Language evolution is a tough thing. One of the major design goals of C# is simplicity, and it shows up in features such as boxing, foreach, and switch on string. During our design process, we reached a point where we became very cautious about adding additional features to the language, since C# has a fair bit of complexity.
After the initial release, we've relaxed that a bit, but simplicity is still a very high priority.
I can't talk about specific features that will be showing up in future releases, but in
general we're looking for features that make C# a better general-purpose programming language.
Personally, why do you think that the computing industry think that C# is a Java
replacement?
Well, they both run on managed environments and they're both based on C/C++ syntax, so I don't think that impression is surprising. Our design point, however, is a fair bit different; we're more concerned about solving real world issues such as working with existing code and being able to version code and not break things. These are issues we've had to deal with for years, and .NET has to solve them.
We also think that the utility of having a construct such as operator overloading in C#
is more important than the possibility of misuse. There are a number of cases where we make
a different design choice than Java did, based on what our customers need to do.
Are you working on any new books (could be either fiction or non-fiction)?
I've been playing around with some ideas related to regular expressions. There aren't many
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