That's not exactly surprising, the C# community has been doing that since the beginning of the language, anything not in the language is pointless academic wankery, and as soon as Microsoft announces it it's the best innovation in computing history since Microsoft was created.
Source: got to interact with the community between the C# 1.0 and 4.0 releases (2.0 added generics, 3.0 added lambdas, neither feature was considered of any use to a Productive Developer up to the day when Microsoft officially announced them).
> That's not exactly surprising, the C# community has been doing that since the beginning of the language, anything not in the language is pointless academic wankery, and as soon as Microsoft announces it it's the best innovation in computing history since Microsoft was created.
That isn't true inside Microsoft. Many of the people who work on C# are the same academic wanks that work on Scala or F#. C# has a different user base from those languages though, so they still have to be careful what they add to the language, and many language features are planned 3 or 4 versions in advance.
No, that was not intended as included in "the C# community". Hell, SPJ used to work at Microsoft (he may still do, but he used to).
> the people who work on C# are the same academic wanks that work on Scala or F#
I'm sure you mean wonks, but I liked the typo.
> C# has a different user base from those languages though, so they still have to be careful what they add to the language, and many language features are planned 3 or 4 versions in advance.
I have no issue with the evolution of C# rate or otherwise, only with a number of its users.
C# has a specific audience, and the language designers cater to them pretty well. I really really like C# as a language, and I don't mind delayed access to certain features that I already like from other languages.
You probably have a beef with some C# users not because of their choice of language, but with the field they work in (primarily enterprise) tends to breed a certain kind of attitude that other techies don't like very much.
It is new to C#, which is slowly catching up to Scala and F# in that regards. Mads Torgesen is good friends with Martin Odersky, in fact, when I first met Mads back in 2006 or so, they were talking about adding pattern matching to C#. C# is a much more conservative language, and it makes sense it would take a while to add.
There are good reasons to use C#, so when it gets a new feature that other languages have had for years, well, it is newsworthy.
There is a paper, Pizza into Java: Translating theory into practice, from Odersky and Wadler at POPL 97 about how to mix generics, lambda and pattern matching in a Java like language.
I think the reason for that enthusiasm is not so much that it's the new hotness (although it is some people's first encounter with the idea), but that it's now available in a mainstream language that their employer will actually let them use (in about five years when they finally bother upgrading Visual Studio).
