New programming language next year?

[Alfred Thompson]

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As for C#, it is very similar to Java. Most of the changes are purely syntactical sugar. While it may have been released to a standards body, the key part of the language, the class libraries, is still proprietary and very much tied to the Windows Operating System (WinForms being the main culprit). C# was designed with minimal portability in mind. Unlike Java, it is not write once, run anywhere. I'd be very surprised to see a change to a C# based micro-controller if only because I don't think any exist (can anyone correct me here?).
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Actually C# was designed for portability. You can run it on Windows, Mac OS X and FreeBSD already and people are working on a Linux version. This does include a lot of the class libraries, though not all of the WinForms stuff. But it's still pretty powerful and less proprietary then Java. And of course you can write a program once and run it on your laptop, your cell phone, your PDA and a host of other small devices. I love the PDA emulator for testing C# PDA programs using Visual Studio .NET BTW. It's been a lot of fun to play with. Hopefully I'll have a PDA soon but I can still program for it without one. In any case the .NET framework was designed from the ground up to be portable across hardware platforms and form factors.

Syntactic sugar being the only differences from Java? I don't think so. For example you can not overload operators in Java but you can in C#. And then there is the whole notion of wrapper classes for Java that you have no need for in C#. Java doesn't treat everything as an object and C# does. That's a pretty big deal in my opinion. That's just the tip of the iceberg too.

I don't know of a C# microprocessor yet but one day soon I have hopes. Just my opinion not based on anything I know.