On history of .NET

It’s not the story per se. I just came across an old interview from 2003 by the lead C# architect Andres Hejlsberg. It’s seems like now some of the important design decisions made not seemed important. But they influenced a lot the whole evolution of .NET ecosystem.

My favorite place: “ask beginning programmers to write a calendar control, they often think to themselves, “Oh, I’m going to write the world’s best calendar control! …” They need to ship a calendar application in two months. They put all this infrastructure into place in the control, and then spend two days writing a crappy calendar application on top of it. They’ll think, “In the next version of the application, I’m going to do so much more.”

Once they start thinking about how they’re actually going to implement all of these other concretizations of their abstract design, however, it turns out that their design is completely wrong. And now they’ve painted themself into a corner, and they have to throw the whole thing out. I have seen that over and over. I’m a strong believer in being minimalistic…”

References:

https://www.artima.com/articles/the-c-design-process
https://www.artima.com/articles/the-trouble-with-checked-exceptions
https://www.artima.com/articles/delegates-components-and-simplexity
https://www.artima.com/articles/versioning-virtual-and-override