His example is just something like .ToDictionary(column => column.First(), column => column.Skip(1).ToList())* .
The motivation to eventually use a Class would be to make use of static typing, e.g. when using an ORM like Entity Framework (a common usecase: reading a CSV file into a relational database). Static typing is usually considered a strength these days, but it does have its downsides (that debate has been done to death). Showing the parallel Clojure code for that could be very interesting.
However, reading CSVs doesn't require enforcing types, even if one wishes to use a library to deal with the complex quoting cases. CsvHelper is tilted in that direction of mapping to a static type, but it's not the only Csv reading library (I'm a pretty happy user of ExcelDataReader[0] for other reasons, and it doesn't enforce mapping. I'm sure there are more functional-style solutions out there). The original post picked the one place C# uses a powerful functional-like syntax, its generalized query language....
* From my limited understanding, not being a user of Clojure yet (I've been considering learning it for some time, just need to find time to do it seriously), each 'sequence' in the original example is a column, not a row. Were each sequence a row, in C# we could have used the positional lambda argument to get the columns.
The motivation to eventually use a Class would be to make use of static typing, e.g. when using an ORM like Entity Framework (a common usecase: reading a CSV file into a relational database). Static typing is usually considered a strength these days, but it does have its downsides (that debate has been done to death). Showing the parallel Clojure code for that could be very interesting.
However, reading CSVs doesn't require enforcing types, even if one wishes to use a library to deal with the complex quoting cases. CsvHelper is tilted in that direction of mapping to a static type, but it's not the only Csv reading library (I'm a pretty happy user of ExcelDataReader[0] for other reasons, and it doesn't enforce mapping. I'm sure there are more functional-style solutions out there). The original post picked the one place C# uses a powerful functional-like syntax, its generalized query language....
* From my limited understanding, not being a user of Clojure yet (I've been considering learning it for some time, just need to find time to do it seriously), each 'sequence' in the original example is a column, not a row. Were each sequence a row, in C# we could have used the positional lambda argument to get the columns.
[0] https://github.com/ExcelDataReader/ExcelDataReader