C# vs Other Programming Languages

C# (pronounced C Sharp) Programming Language seems popular these days based on market trends. If you are working with .Net and ASP technologies, you are required to be familiar with the C# accurately. Here we will describes specifically what is similar, what is different, and the motivation behind the C# preference.

C# Programming Language

C# Programming Language is the prime language for Microsoft applications and services. It was designed & developed after the legal battle between Microsoft and Sun Microsystems (the developers of Java). Microsoft released first version of C# with Visual Studio 2002. MSDN introduces C# as

C# is an elegant and type-safe object-oriented language that enables developers to build a variety of secure and robust applications that run on the .NET Framework.

You may have heard of other programming languages, such as Java, Visual Basic, C, C++, Ada, Lisp, COBOL, FORTRAN, Haskell, ML, Python, Perl, JavaScript (which is very different from Java), and others but the most important of these are C++ & Java.

C# vs C++

Here are some C# properties that make it preferable over C++.

1. It has native garbage-collection.
2. It allows you to treat class-methods’ signatures as free functions (i.e. ignoring the statically typed this pointer argument), and hence create more dynamic and flexible relationships between classes.
3. C# has a huge standard library with so much useful stuff that’s well-implemented and easy to use.
4. It allows for both managed and native code blocks.
5. Assembly versioning easily remedy DLL hell problems.
6. You can set classes, methods and fields to be assembly-internal (which means they are accessible from anywhere within the DLL they’re declared in, but not from other assemblies).

C# vs Java

Some of the properties that makes C# better than Java.

1. Instead of a lot of noise (EJB, private static class implementations, etc) you get elegant and friendly native constructs such as Properties and Events.
2. You have real generics (not the bad casting joke that Java calls generics), and you can perform reflection on them.
3. It supports native resource-management idioms (the using statement). Java 7 is also going to support this, but C# has had it for a way longer time.
4. It doesn’t have checked exceptions.
5. It has Lambdas and LINQ, therefore supporting a small amount of functional programming.
6. It allows for both generic covariance and contravariance explicitly.
7. It has dynamic variables, if you want them.
8. Better enumeration support, with the yield statement.
9. It allows you to define new value (or non-reference) types.

Although C# is better than Java in certain ways, but are so similar in most ways that once you have learned how to program in C#, it will be trivial to transfer your knowledge to Java. There is also a white paper documentation written by Kirk Radeck on MSDN as Learn about the differences between C# and Java where he discusses main difference between C# & Java & the benefits of them on each other.

Summary

The environment for your software is most important for choosing C#. If you work in an environment with Windows clients, Windows servers, Active Directory, IIS and maybe SQL Server then C# is the far best language with the .NET Framework. If you work in a Unix environment with e.g. web services, Java would be my choice. And if you work with embedded systems or have to integrate with hardware devices Java or C++ will be a good choice.

Source.