#anpost

[anheliotrope]

Rambling About C# Being Alright

I think C# is an alright language. This is one of the highest distinctions I can give to a language.

Warning: This post is verbose and rambly and probably only good at telling you why someone might like C# and not much else.

~~~

There's something I hate about every other language. Worst, there's things I hate about other languages that I know will never get better. Even worse, some of those things ALSO feel like unforced errors.

With C# there's a few things I dislike or that are missing. C#'s feature set does not obviously excel at anything, but it avoids making any huge misstep in things I care about. Nothing in C# makes me feel like the language designer has personally harmed me.

C# is a very tolerable language.

C# is multi-paradigm.

C# is the Full Middle Malcomist language.

C# will try to not hurt you.

A good way to describe C# is "what if Java sucked less". This, of course, already sounds unappealing to many, but that's alright. I'm not trying to gas it up too much here.

C# has sins, but let's try to put them into some context here and perhaps the reason why I'm posting will become more obvious:

C# didn't try to avoid generics and then implement them in a way that is very limiting (cough Go).

C# doesn't hamstring your ability to have statement lambdas because the language designer dislikes them and also because the language designer decided to have semantic whitespace making statement lambdas harder to deal with (cough Python).

C# doesn't require you to explicitly wrap value types into reference types so you can put value types into collections (cough Java).

C# doesn't ruin your ability to interact with memory efficiently because it forbids you from creating custom value types, ergo everything goes to the heap (cough cough Java, Minecraft).

C# doesn't have insane implicit type coercions that have become the subject of language design comedy (cough JavaScript).

C# doesn't keep privacy accessors as a suggestion and has the developers pinkie swear about it instead of actually enforcing it (cough cough Python).

Plainly put, a lot of the time I find C# to be alright by process of elimination. I'm not trying to shit on your favorite language. Everyone has different things they find tolerable. I have the Buddha nature so I wish for all things to find their tolerable language.

I do also think that C# is notable for being a mainstream language (aka not Haskell) that has a smaller amount of egregious mistakes, quirks and Faustian bargains.

The Typerrrrr

C# is statically typed, but the typing is largely effortless to navigate unlike something like Rust, and the GC gives a greater degree of safety than something like C++.

Of course, the typing being easy to work it also makes it less safe than Rust. But this is an appropriate trade-off for certain kinds of applications, especially considering that C# is memory safe by virtue of running on a VM. Don't come at me, I'm a Rust respecter!!

You know how some people talk about Python being amazing for prototyping? That's how I feel about C#. No matter how much time I would dedicate to Python, C# would still be a more productive language for me. The type system would genuinely make me faster for the vast majority of cases. Of course Python has gradual typing now, so any comparison gets more difficult when you consider that. But what I'm trying to say is that I never understood the idea that doing away entirely with static typing is good for fast iteration.

Also yes, C# can be used as a repl. Leave me alone with your repls. Also, while the debugger is active you can also evaluate arbitrary code within the current scope.

I think that going full dynamic typing is a mistake in almost every situation. The fact that C# doesn't do that already puts it above other languages for me. This stance on typing is controversial, but it's my opinion that is really shouldn't be. And the wind has constantly been blowing towards adding gradual typing to dynamic languages.

The modest typing capabilities C# coupled with OOP and inheritance lets you create pretty awful OOP slop. But that's whatever. At work we use inheritance in very few places where it results in neat code reuse, and then it's just mostly interfaces getting implemented.

C#'s typing and generic system is powerful enough to offer you a plethora of super-ergonomic collection transformation methods via the LINQ library. There's a lot of functional-style programming you can do with that. You know, map, filter, reduce, that stuff?

Even if you make a completely new collection type, if it implements IEnumerable<T> it will benefit from LINQ automatically. Every language these days has something like this, but it's so ridiculously easy to use in C#. Coupled with how C# lets you (1) easily define immutable data types, (2) explicitly control access to struct or class members, (3) do pattern matching, you can end up with code that flows really well.

A Friendly Kitchen Sink

Some people have described C#'s feature set as bloated. It is getting some syntactic diversity which makes it a bit harder to read someone else's code. But it doesn't make C# harder to learn, since it takes roughly the same amount of effort to get to a point where you can be effective in it.

Most of the more specific features can be effortlessly ignored. The ones that can't be effortlessly ignored tend to bring something genuinely useful to the language -- such as tuples and destructuring. Tuples have their own syntax, the syntax is pretty intuitive, but the first time you run into it, you will have to do a bit of learning.

C# has an immense amount of small features meant to make the language more ergonomic. They're too numerous to mention and they just keep getting added.

I'd like to draw attention to some features not because they're the most important but rather because it feels like they communicate the "personality" of C#. Not sure what level of detail was appropriate, so feel free to skim.

Stricter Null Handling. If you think not having to explicitly deal with null is the billion dollar mistake, then C# tries to fix a bit of the problem by allowing you to enable a strict context where you have to explicitly tell it that something can be null, otherwise it will assume that the possibility of a reference type being null is an error. It's a bit more complicated than that, but it definitely helps with safety around nullability.

Default Interface Implementation. A problem in C# which drives usage of inheritance is that with just interfaces there is no way to reuse code outside of passing function pointers. A lot of people don't get this and think that inheritance is just used because other people are stupid or something. If you have a couple of methods that would be implemented exactly the same for classes 1 through 99, but somewhat differently for classes 100 through 110, then without inheritance you're fucked. A much better way would be Rust's trait system, but for that to work you need really powerful generics, so it's too different of a path for C# to trod it. Instead what C# did was make it so that you can write an implementation for methods declared in an interface, as long as that implementation only uses members defined in the interface (this makes sense, why would it have access to anything else?). So now you can have a default implementation for the 1 through 99 case and save some of your sanity. Of course, it's not a panacea, if the implementation of the method requires access to the internal state of the 1 through 99 case, default interface implementation won't save you. But it can still make it easier via some techniques I won't get into. The important part is that default interface implementation allows code reuse and reduces reasons to use inheritance.

Performance Optimization. C# has a plethora of features regarding that. Most of which will never be encountered by the average programmer. Examples: (1) stackalloc - forcibly allocate reference types to the stack if you know they won't outlive the current scope. (2) Specialized APIs for avoiding memory allocations in happy paths. (3) Lazy initialization APIs. (4) APIs for dealing with memory more directly that allow high performance when interoping with C/C++ while still keeping a degree of safety.

Fine Control Over Async Runtime. C# lets you write your own... async builder and scheduler? It's a bit esoteric and hard to describe. But basically all the functionality of async/await that does magic under the hood? You can override that magic to do some very specific things that you'll rarely need. Unity3D takes advantage of this in order to allow async/await to work on WASM even though it is a single-threaded environment. It implements a cooperative scheduler so the program doesn't immediately freeze the moment you do await in a single-threaded environment. Most people don't know this capability exists and it doesn't affect them.

Tremendous Amount Of Synchronization Primitives and API. This ones does actually make multithreaded code harder to deal with, but basically C# erred a lot in favor of having many different ways to do multithreading because they wanted to suit different usecases. Most people just deal with idiomatic async/await code, but a very small minority of C# coders deal with locks, atomics, semaphores, mutex, monitors, interlocked, spin waiting etc. They knew they couldn't make this shit safe, so they tried to at least let you have ready-made options for your specific use case, even if it causes some balkanization.

Shortly Begging For Tagged Unions

What I miss from C# is more powerful generic bounds/constraints and tagged unions (or sum types or discriminated unions or type unions or any of the other 5 names this concept has).

The generic constraints you can use in C# are anemic and combined with the lack of tagged unions this is rather painful at times.

I remember seeing Microsoft devs saying they don't see enough of a usecase for tagged unions. I've at times wanted to strangle certain people. These two facts are related to one another.

My stance is that if you think your language doesn't need or benefit from tagged unions, either your language is very weird, or, more likely you're out of your goddamn mind. You are making me do really stupid things every time I need to represent a structure that can EITHER have a value of type A or a value of type B.

But I think C# will eventually get tagged unions. There's a proposal for it here. I would be overjoyed if it got implemented. It seems like it's been getting traction.

Also there was an entire section on unchecked exceptions that I removed because it wasn't interesting enough. Yes, C# could probably have checked exceptions and it didn't and it's a mistake. But ultimately it doesn't seem to have caused any make-or-break in a comparison with Java, which has them. They'd all be better off with returning an Error<T>. Short story is that the consequences of unchecked exceptions have been highly tolerable in practice.

Ecosystem State & FOSSness

C# is better than ever and the tooling ecosystem is better than ever. This is true of almost every language, but I think C# receives a rather high amount of improvements per version. Additionally the FOSS story is at its peak.

Roslyn, the bedrock of the toolchain, the compiler and analysis provider, is under MIT license. The fact that it does analysis as well is important, because this means you can use the wealth of Roslyn analyzers to do linting.

If your FOSS tooling lets you compile but you don't get any checking as you type, then your development experience is wildly substandard.

A lot of stupid crap with cross-platform compilation that used to be confusing or difficult is now rather easy to deal with. It's basically as easy as (1) use NET Core, (2) tell dotnet to build for Linux. These steps take no extra effort and the first step is the default way to write C# these days.

Dotnet is part of the SDK and contains functionality to create NET Core projects and to use other tools to build said projects. Dotnet is published under MIT, because the whole SDK and runtime are published under MIT.

Yes, the debugger situation is still bad -- there's no FOSS option for it, but this is more because nobody cares enough to go and solve it. Jetbrains proved anyone can do it if they have enough development time, since they wrote a debugger from scratch for their proprietary C# IDE Rider.

Where C# falls flat on its face is the "userspace" ecosystem. Plainly put, because C# is a Microsoft product, people with FOSS inclinations have steered clear of it to such a degree that the packages you have available are not even 10% of what packages a Python user has available, for example. People with FOSS inclinations are generally the people who write packages for your language!!

I guess if you really really hate leftpad, you might think this is a small bonus though.

Where-in I talk about Cross-Platform

The biggest thing the ecosystem has been lacking for me is a package, preferably FOSS, for developing cross-platform applications. Even if it's just cross-platform desktop applications.

Like yes, you can build C# to many platforms, no sweat. The same way you can build Rust to many platforms, some sweat. But if you can't show a good GUI on Linux, then it's not practically-speaking cross-platform for that purpose.

Microsoft has repeatedly done GUI stuff that, predictably, only works on Windows. And yes, Linux desktop is like 4%, but that 4% contains >50% of the people who create packages for your language's ecosystem, almost the exact point I made earlier. If a developer runs Linux and they can't have their app run on Linux, they are not going to touch your language with a ten foot pole for that purpose. I think this largely explains why C#'s ecosystem feels stunted.

The thing is, I'm not actually sure how bad or good the situation is, since most people just don't even try using C# for this usecase. There's a general... ecosystem malaise where few care to use the language for this, chiefly because of the tone that Microsoft set a decade ago. It's sad.

HOWEVER.

Avalonia, A New Hope?

Today we have Avalonia. Avalonia is an open-source framework that lets you build cross-platform applications in C#. It's MIT licensed. It will work on Windows, macOS, Linux, iOS, Android and also somehow in the browser. It seems to this by actually drawing pixels via SkiaSharp (or optionally Direct2D on Windows).

They make money by offering migration services from WPF app to Avalonia. Plus general support.

I can't say how good Avalonia is yet. I've researched a bit and it's not obviously bad, which is distinct from being good. But if it's actually good, this would be a holy grail for the ecosystem:

You could use a statically typed language that is productive for this type of software development to create cross-platform applications that have higher performance than the Electron slop. That's valuable!

This possibility warrants a much higher level of enthusiasm than I've seen, especially within the ecosystem itself. This is an ecosystem that was, for a while, entirely landlocked, only able to make Windows desktop applications.

I cannot overstate how important it is for a language's ecosystem to have a package like this and have it be good. Rust is still missing a good option. Gnome is unpleasant to use and buggy. Falling back to using Electron while writing Rust just seems like a bad joke. A lot of the Rust crates that are neither Electron nor Gnome tend to be really really undercooked.

And now I've actually talked myself into checking out Avalonia... I mean after writing all of that I feel like a charlatan for not having investigated it already.

[spindlewoed]

obligatory heads up I’m about to post a bunch of shit from a new fandom: we’re into disco elysium now. incoming a bunch of reblogs of old musty men and meta posts, feel free to unfollow etc

[dorianmathay]

Watch "This is How Queen Bees are Shipped in the Mail" on YouTube

amazing material!

[heartorbit]

always by your side

[nostalgic-muffins]

an and i were playing hide and seek (she won)

[winterswhite]

(hi tumblr, i've been dead for a bit, how is everyone)

[iceicewifey]

👉👈 would you feel like talking about Da Ice babies?

uwahh caz pls,,, i always feel like talking about them, i just have trouble containing myself once i start talking is all _(:3」∠)_ dkdksmdk

i can’t remember how much i’ve actually shared about them beyond just making kasim canon back whenever that happened, so i'll just drop a few bullet points or something to keep myself from rambling

(i usually view them in their ages around part 6 btw—20, 18 & 16. they don't do anything in p6 tho, except ramy in a canon compliant au but that's an entire can of worms in itself)

　ramy

・he looks laid back but he's always getting into shit and stealing his mom’s cigarettes. ・wrestling fan. used to stone cold stunner his siblings ・likes to hide things that people are looking for with his stand—especially shay. half the time when she can't find something it's ramy's fault. loves her but loves to annoy her just as much bgbkjf ・had a juggalo phase in high school...... ・struggles to make & keep friends and has a tendency to do whatever he's dared to—no matter how dumb or disruptive it may be. ・literally terrified of creepy crawlies and WILL cry if he sees a bug in the house.

　aaliyah

・major daddy’s girl like,, she used to cry whenever vanilla was out of her sight for more than 5 seconds as a kid. ・often the ‘voice of reason’ between her brothers and tries her best to keep them out of trouble... as long as ramy isn't being too annoying /lh ・she had a bit of a mean streak when she was in her mid-teens because she was self conscious about her height—embraced it a bit later on but still won’t wear anything other than flats/trainers. ・shay calls her 'bean sprout' because one minute she was just this little thing then the next she's 5'10" dfgbgj ・🏳‍🌈 (also a stand user but idk how to explain hers simply jhfbvhdf)

　kasim

・the youngest and only child that wasn't born in florida—also the only one with shay's blue eyes ・tends to be very timid and keeps to himself when his brother isn’t dragging him around. ・carries a laptop bag literally every where since it's somewhat tied to his stand. ・not exactly a hacker since his stand does all the work but still. may or may not have accidentally accessed the pentagon's database once or twice. ・arch linux user btw. he will mention this often.

they embody this meme btw and it cracks me up whenever i think about it

[minecraftgender]

Hello, this is AL-AN. I actually would like everyone to know that I am very open to music suggestions. As you may see, my playlist currently contains a lot of rock but I would like to broaden my horizons a bit.

[anheliotrope]

It's always "funny" to remember that software development as field often operates on the implicit and completely unsupported assumption that security bugs are fixed faster than they are introduced, adjusting for security bug severity.

This assumption is baked into security policies that are enforced at the organizational level regardless of whether they are locally good ideas or not. So you have all sorts of software updating basically automatically and this is supposedly proof that you deserve that SOC2 certification.

Different companies have different incentives. There are two main incentives:

Limiting legal liability

Improving security outcomes for users

Most companies have an overwhelming proportion of the first incentive.

This would be closer to OK if people were more honest about it, but even within a company they often start developing The Emperor's New Clothes types of behaviour.

---

I also suspect that security has generally been a convenient scapegoat to justify annoying, intrusive and outright abusive auto-updating practices in consumer software. "Nevermind when we introduced that critical security bug and just update every day for us, alright??"

Product managers almost always want every user to be on the latest version, for many reasons of varying coherence. For example, it enables A/B testing (provided your software doesn't just silently hotpatch it without your consent anyway).

---

I bring this up because (1) I felt like it, (2) there are a lot of not-so-well-supported assumptions in this field, which are mainly propagated for unrelated reasons. Companies will try to select assumptions that suit them.

Yes, if someone does software development right, the software should converge towards being more secure as it gets more updates. But the reality is that libraries and applications are heavily heterogenous -- they have different risk profiles, different development practices, different development velocities, and different tooling. The correct policy is more complicated and contextual.

Corporate incentives taint the field epistemologically. There's a general desire to confuse what is good for the corporation with what is good for users with what is good for the field.

The way this happens isn't by proposing obviously insane practices, but by taking things that sound maybe-reasonable and artificially amplifying confidence levels. There are aspects of the distortion that are obvious and aspects of the distortion that are most subtle. If you're on the inside and never talked to weird FOSS people, it's easy to find it normal.

One of the eternal joys and frustrations of being a software developer is trying to have effective knowledge about software development. And generally a pre-requisite to that is not believing false things.

For all the bullshit that goes on in the field, I feel _good_ about being able to form my own opinions. The situation, roughly speaking, is not rosy, but learning to derive some enjoyment from countering harmful and incorrect beliefs is a good adaptation. If everyone with a clue becomes miserable and frustrated then computing is doomed. So my first duty is to myself -- to talk about such things without being miserable. I tend to do a pretty okay job at that.

[echidnana]

ada and leon's dynamic is so good. the way after their first interaction in 4 they both just relax after the initial scuffle. leon hasn't seen her in 6 years, last he did she betrayed him, and he still just. relaxes in her presence. the trust is still there.

[leatherbookmark]

in other news:

huh, kk in... macau? along with three other celebs... could be interesting. he looks like an elongated grandpa though (somewhat fond)

my 12:00 album came today... wh. what. it left the warehouse in japan on the 11th, was shipped out (from japan) on the 13th, and has arrived today, on the 18th. this really is the shortest i’ve ever waited to get a package from asia i think

[picusviridis]

ok you lot were not lying the tumblr search system is a wee shit

[space-blue]

So true, all of it. The recent AI book cover prize winner debacle made me incredibly dejected. Writers and readers dunking on artists right until there was literally no ground to stand on... The lack of perspective or self awareness was disturbing.

A note to all creatives:

Right now, you have to be a team player. You cannot complain about AI being used to fuck over your industry and then turn around and use it on somebody else’s industry.

No AI book covers. No making funny little videos using deepfakes to make an actor say stuff they never did. No AI translation of your book. No AI audiobooks. No AI generated moodboards or fancasts or any of that shit. No feeding someone else’s unfinished work into Chat GPT “because you just want to know how it ends*” (what the fuck is wrong with you?). No playing around with AI generated 3D assets you can’t ascertain the origin of. None of it. And stop using AI filters on your selfies or ESPECIALLY using AI on somebody else’s photo or artwork.

We are at a crossroad and at a time of historically shitty conditions for working artists across ALL creative fields, and we gotta stick together. And you know what? Not only is standing up for other artists against exploitation and theft the morally correct thing to do, it’s also the professionally smartest thing to do, too. Because the corporations will fuck you over too, and then they do it’s your peers that will hold you up. And we have a long memory.

Don’t make the mistake of thinking “your peers” are only the people in your own industry. Writers can’t succeed without artists, editors, translators, etc making their books a reality. Illustrators depend on writers and editors for work. Video creators co-exist with voice actors and animators and people who do 3D rendering etc. If you piss off everyone else but the ones who do the exact same job you do, congratulations! You’ve just sunk your career.

Always remember: the artists who succeed in this career path, the ones who get hired or are sought after for commissions or collaboration, they aren’t the super talented “fuck you I got mine” types. They’re the one who show up to do the work and are easy to get along with.

And they especially are not scabs.

*that’s not even how it ends that’s a statistically likely and creatively boring way for it to end. Why would you even want to read that.

[nostalgic-muffins]

i love her so much shes so fuckin tiny dude

[winterswhite]

Some of my thoughts after rereading the A3! prologue:

Resisting every urge to point out interesting things I'm noticing in A3EN's localization of the prologue with 3.5 more years of Japanese knowledge, this is a reading club, not a translation club

Why is this the only instance of pink text in the game? I think it's really funny how they highlighted important lines in pink here and then proceeded to never do that again

Logistically I know it was only done here as a way of introducing the player to things and it has no real place anywhere else in the story, but it's still funny

Tsuzuru not catching on about the street act is so cute www

I love how you can tell from this very first interaction between Tasuku and Haruto, and then between Haruto and Tsuzuru, that Godza is a kinda messy environment behind the scenes

In retrospect, this was so fucked up of Izumi's mom (I didn't think anything of it back then, but with the knowledge I have now... whew)

hE RECOGNIZES HER

"KYAAAAAAAAA"

BACKHOE

I think it's so interesting that Sakoda was able to get a permit for the backhoe? It's something so small but I think it's fun how we see here that he has the skill needed to safely operate heavy machinery even though he's often seen as someone who isn't good at much of anything, so it really just comes down to his life circumstances more than his actual ability (I mean the kid's just being taught to read at a third grade level, and it's not his fault)

Pictured: The moment it was over for me

This whole scene is such a mess

The way Sakyo implies there have been other plays recently?? If this is Sakuya's first show, how did those work?

Oh Sakuya sounds so awkward it's hard to watch. Shoutout to Sakai for achieving that

Izumi's thoughts as she watches Sakuya perform hit different knowing about her own failures and experiences with theater

This line always, always gets me. Hard work alone doesn't amount to crap in this world. It never did for him. His mother worked so hard and yet they were poor, he worked hard and could never achieve his own goals... hard work never earned him anything. If it did, maybe he could've stood on this stage, too. Maybe Mankai wouldn't have reached this point. Maybe we wouldn't be here.

Honestly, everything here shows how much Sakyo loves Mankai and how hurt he is too

This conversation between Sakyo and Matsukawa is so much, they both care so much about the theater but Matsukawa is so desperately latching onto it while Sakyo has resigned himself to its fate, he's all but given up (just like he has on himself lol <- in pain)

Oh boy Yukio mention (the way he haunts the narrative is so much)

It's funny that Sakyo takes that jab at Matsukawa for wanting to lean on Yukio and count on him to single-handedly save Mankai, considering what he just said about hard work. If Yukio can't be relied on as the "savior" of Mankai (all the actors need to come back and everything needs to be the way it was before) and hard work alone won't do it either... he really has lost hope

Sakyo you fucking tsundere

You're the boss, boss!

Something something Izumi about to lose the last connection she has to her father even if it's not one she ever really had much of a part in before

Oh Izumi you're so bad at this

Sakyo is Not taking this (meanwhile, Matsukawa...) I do appreciate how he still gave her a chance though, however small it was

Honestly I feel bad for Matsukawa here, knowing how he's been trying so desperately just to keep the troupe afloat for eight years even though it clearly hasn't been going well

Obviously there was no way to fit this into the English localization, but I love how Sakuya introduces himself and then tells Izumi how to spell his name in kanji because of the many different ways it can be written (花の咲くの咲也です！)

I also really appreciate Izumi as a character and how real she feels right from the very beginning, from her interest in theater to her hammy acting to her quick thinking skills

Matsukawa you've been at this for years... (also I'm curious about Izumi's old troupe)

I didn't care much for Sakuya when I first read this story, but knowing all that I do about him now, this is all so endearing... he's so sweet in how he's comforting Izumi and checking in on her (and his whole thing about not wanting to lose the troupe hurts)

"Might as well fail like men!" thank you for the encouragement Matsukawa

I honestly think there's so much to be said about Masumi's character right from the beginning, like with him repeatedly asking how his acting was

Tsuzuru the biggest "struggling uni student" mood

Oh Masumi's line about just taking anyone hits so different in Japanese... Maybe I'm just not as good at picking up on certain types of slang and innuendo, but his wording is so much more... questionable in Japanese, that double meaning cannot be ignored.

Oh god I'm thinking about the A3 timeline again. I will once again try to push it back into the furthest depths of my mind because there clearly is no such thing as "time" in this universe and trying to figure it out has given me headaches before.

[minecraftgender]

Imagine Dragons keeps me alive, I think.