Discussions

@ManipUni: if you're willing to get really into WPF and generating controls in code, you could check out Charles Petzold's WPF book, he doesn't even introduce XAML at all until halfway through

speaking of IDE tooltips and type inference, there's a nice tool for formatting your F# code for the web complete with VS tooltips: http://tomasp.net/blog/fswebsnippets-intro.aspx

when will we get this on C9? 

@fanbaby: Personally, my concern is that, regardless of whether you do or don't like Javascript as a language, having only one language to develop in is a step back from other platforms that are designed such that anyone can write a compiler that converts whatever language they like (or a new, ground-breaking language they invent) to a bytecode or native code. Choice (and room for innovation) > no choice.

However, the GWT (and for F#, WebSharper) approach of compiling languages to JS itself is interesting. I'm worried that, because JS is designed to be a high-level language rather than a compiler target, it may not work as well for the latter purpose. At least, compilers targeting JS still seem to be a lot rarer than compilers targeting other platforms, which makes me wonder why. But I haven't given it serious thought, actually one of my plans for the near future is to look into this more (and delve more into studying compilers in general).

I like that it also allows you to create anonymous methods that return Task<T> and let you "await" within the method body. Is there any possibility of C# / VB also adding the ability (which F# now has) to create anonymous methods that return IEnumerable<T> and let you "yield" within the method body? Both for symmetry, and because it would be a really useful feature.

ok, my last post was a pretty lame attempt at trolling I'll admit.

@fanbaby: acceptable to whom?

I agree that it's misleading, but actually I think I'm going to start using it myself just because it annoys you. Love those popular Java libraries like JavaQuery!

@W3bbo: but the whole problem is having to deal with the impedance mismatch between CLR and HTML/JS (and SQL too), which ASP.NET doesn't solve

Now if we'd only get a GWT-alike for every language ... (including, but certainly not limited to, currently CLR-targeted ones)

Note word choice: "displacing". Something can be displaced by a little ways without being completely replaced. 

... and yet, all of MSFT's great dev tools, frameworks, etc. are still primarily C#/VB/F#-based ...

... shouldn't there be a way to use one with the other? Where the heck is Volta, anyway?