Is C# obsolete?

 

In the history of programming language there is a tendency available from low level- towards high level languages. From the perspective of the C language all the programs written in Assembly are outdated. The reason is that the source code can be written in a shorter amount of time. Because of this reason the C# language has replaced the former C++ language entirely.

On the long hand the transition towards high level language will make even c# obsolete. The reason is, that in comparison to scripting languages like Python, C# can be called a low level language. There is need to use datatypes like int and string and many class initialization will need a lot of boiler plate code. Without any doubt the Python interpreter is more high level than C# so the C# language is outdated.

Writing a simple hello world gui app with C# will take around 30% more lines of code than the same app written in Python. Such an overhead is difficult to maintain and it will increase the time to market time.

According to the Rosetttacode website, the string append problem can be solved with many programming languages. The low level C language will need the most amount of written lines, then comes C# and the shortest code can be written in Python.

// c
#include<stdio.h>
#include<string.h>
#include<stdlib.h>

char *sconcat(const char *s1, const char *s2)
{
  char *s0 = malloc(strlen(s1)+strlen(s2)+1);
  strcpy(s0, s1);
  strcat(s0, s2);
  return s0;
}
int main()
{
  char str1[]="Hello ";
  char str2[]="World";
  char *str3=sconcat(str1,str2);
  printf("%s\n",str3);
  return 0;
}


// c#
class Program
{
    static void Main(string[] args)
    {
        string x = "foo";
        x += "bar";
        System.Console.WriteLine(x);
    }
}

// python
str = "12345678";
str += "9!";
print(str)

 

The difference between C# and Python is not huge, but C# will need around 30% more space for writing the semicolon, the datatypes and lots of extra code for anything. This additional effort has to be written by the programmer which reduces the productivity. Basically spoken, C# is outdated because it not high level enough.

Let us take a closer look into the C program. First thing to mention is, that the string concat method was implemented safe and is one of the easiest to understand. It is using in addition external routines to make things easier. It is possible to create more advanced string concat routines. Nevertheless the lines of code are difficult to understand. For C programmers it makes sense to use three different commands like malloc, strcpy and so on only to add str1 with str2 but from an outside perspective, the source code is a bit hard to read.

Such situation is available for many problems which should be implemented in the C language. In most cases, there are at least 40 different ways available how to solve it, and all of them have to do with pointer manipulation and manually typing in lots of code lines. In contrast, the written code in the python language is much easier to type and to understand. All what is needed is a statement like “str1+str2” without further subroutines.

The advantage is not located in Python directly, because string manipulation is also easy going in languages like PHP and Ruby. But it has to do with low level vs high level languages.