by raddan | 2025-11-12 21:00:29+00:00
I wouldn't call this a silly question at all. But having recently converted my intro data structures course from Java to C#, I can talk about why C# might be better. I have programmed regularly in both languages for the last 15 or so years (in addition to regularly programming in TypeScript, Scala, and F#).

Java is fast and reasonably safe. It has a lot of software (especially OSS) software. Its package system (Maven and the like) is ok, but not great. The language occasionally gets new features, but change is slow.

To a first approximation, C# is a lot like Java, so it is relatively easy to switch. But C# is, hands down, a better language. The most obvious thing that a developer might notice that that C# does not force you to be extremely verbose like Java, although you can code in the Java style if you like.

Having switched my course from Java to C#, the most obvious "win" was the fact that, every lecture, I would delete some slides that explained painful Java corner cases to students. For example, Java's implementation of generics. Boxed types are necessary, and explaining them to students who have never seen any form of polymorphism before is difficult. After an entire semester of deleting a handful of slides each lecture, I have save _three entire lectures_ worth of corner cases!

Some C# niceties:

* Everything is an object, even value types! So our favorite `ToString` and `GetHashCode` methods, etc, are all there. * Generics work as you would expect with very few weird corner cases. No boxed types because... everything is an object! * The last two facts mean that you also get generic arrays, which are fantastic (and, incidentally, are also _implemented_ in C#, which is super cool). * By default, reference types are not nullable. This is a little bit of a pain for an intro data structures course (we turn them off), but it is a great idea for commercial programming. * switch statements work the way you would expect a modern switch to work, and in some cases they even do exhaustiveness checking like a functional language. * Speaking of... LINQ! * In general, the standard library is also better organized. Interfaces start with "I". Collections libraries have been carefully designed and learned many lessons from Java. A good example of an improvement over Java is the IEnumerable<T>/IEnumerator<T> class, which is simpler than Java's Iterator<T>. * Type inference is limited compared to a functional language, but it is dramatically better than Java. Being able to write `var` is wonderful. * Properties are really nice, and the shorthand syntax for property getters/setters saves a lot of time. * C# has a rich set of value types, including structs. Java may have added something like this, since I remember the Scala people hacking away on it, but it is used pervasively in C#, and you can make very fast data structures that take advantage of spatial locality. Rolling one's own hash table implementation in C# is actually kind of fun. * .NET's runtime reflection capabilities are amazing. All of my autograders make extensive use of reflection instead of forcing students to compile with interfaces; this gives them a degree of freedom in implementing things. * NuGet is a million times easier to use than Maven.

The downside is that C# is definitely not as fast as Java, in particular when the runtime is starting up. I remember how painful Java startup used to be, so I am optimistic that this will improve eventually.

Anecdotally, my students this semester are demonstrably more capable programmers after a semester of C# than a semester of Java. It might just be that I got lucky with this group, but I have been teaching this same course (except in Java) for the last 7 years, and this feels like a real effect.