Nobody can. But then, C# isn't easy to start with.
"The least painful" is what I would say.
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I'll bite again. What makes C# so difficult to start with? I seriously want to know what obstacles are out there for people interested in starting with C#.
C# by itself isn't terribly difficult, other than its constantly balooning specification. A lot of the percieved difficulty with C# today comes from the rapid shifts in direction from Microsoft in terms of the "Microsoft Way" of using it. A prime example is the DLinq / Linq to SQL / ADO.Net Entities fiasco that's occurred in the past 5 or 6 months; Microsoft is trying to react quickly, but in doing so is crossing its own streams.
Of course, these are all really .Net problems, but more often than not, C# and .Net are used interchangeably.
You're exactly right, those are .NET problems not specific to a language, and not really problems for a hacker. There are multiple open source ORMs that take full advantage of the language features (like LINQ) and aren't subject to MS's whims.
I think that "constantly balooning specification" is an overstatement. Look at the release timeline:
- 2002: Version 1 (with VS.net 2002)
- October 2005: Version 2 (with VS2005)
- November 2007: Version 3 (with VS2008)
- Oct/Nov 2009 (I'm guessing): Version 4 (with VS2010)
I don't think the time-line has as much to do with it as the scope of the changes do. Again, this is personal opinion; and I'm speaking from the angle of someone who has spent many years doing consulting work on the Microsoft stack, and having to deal with figuring out which ways the 9-to-5'ers are going to break things next.
Version 1.0 of the C# specification clocks in at 405 pages. There was an addendum in 1.2 that I'll leave out, because it was a respecification of 1.0.
2.0 came along and added 117 pages of specification - including generics, partial classes, iterators, and a handful of other things. On pure specification, that's a growth of 25% to the core language. (I know this isn't really scientific, but I think you get my drift).
Then in 3.0, just 2 years later, the spec is back to over 500 pages (just for the language!). This version added a bunch of functional paradigm stuff to the language, lambdas, linq and the like.
And now in 4.0, they're talking about making C# essentially a dynamic language.
Now, all this being said, I really do like C#; but I think that it behooves everyone who likes C# to admit that it's a large and evolving language; the paradigms that Microsoft keeps adding to the language don't really seem to fit from one version to the next.
This is one area where I think MS gets a bad rap. If they didn't keep adding new stuff, everyone would complain that they were stagnant and falling behind the times. So they add popular new features to C# like lambdas and such, and now they're bloated.
4.0 will not essentially be a dynamic language. They're making it much easier to interop with dynamic languages by adding some dynamic constructs, but it's still as statically typed as ever. 'dynamic' is a shortcut to save you time, not re-invent how you work with C#.
Not going to argue either way (I do like both Java and C#, choosing one over the other depending on what I want/need to do)... but don't you think most enterprise languages mature over time too?
Java seems to be no exception: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Java_version_history