Why I’m getting interested in C#

I installed Visual Studio .NET 2003 last night. It took forever to install and by the time it finished I was too knackered to do anything other than check it was working. But I'm now ready to try my hand at a bit of C# programming.

Why am I even thinking about meddling with C#? It may seem a little dumb because I'm a technical author. I don't need to be able to code C#. But the reasons are historical.

In 1989 I was studying publishing and I needed a word processor. I bought myself an Amstrad PCW and fairly soon discovered that what I'd thought was just a glorified typewriter was actually a computer. It ran on the CP/M operating system and had a pretty good version of BASIC called Mallard BASIC. I used this to write simple games. The best of these was a program I called Chomp, which was inspired by PacMan. The trouble was that the more features I added to Chomp (different levels and configurable settings) the slower it ran.

I found out about C and it immediately seemed that a compiled program would obviously run must faster than an interpreted program. So I bought a copy of C for the PCW and started learning how to code in C. Straight away I was impressed by the way C helped you to write logically structured programs. I discovered the beauty of functions, and realised what a mess you can get yourself into with BASIC.

However, I then graduated and got a job and started a family and got married - all at about the same time - and stopped playing around with programming for several years. Then I quit the job I was doing, bought myself a computer and started freelancing. Now that I had a computer again I got back into coding. First I wanted to create an Access database for my business, so that involved learning how to use Visual Basic and learning more about database systems. Then I wanted to have my own website, so inevitably I came to know Perl.

Perl has been my programming language of choice for the last few years. It was originally specifically designed for working with text, so it's my kind of language. It makes sense to me and I find it easy to use. I like the fact that you don't have to worry about what type of data you assign to a variable, Perl figures it all out for you, and things are labelled with $, %, @, # so that you can see what they are at a glance.

But C was always there in the background as my first serious programming language. Over the summer I bought a C book for the first time since I bought the Kernighan and Ritchie book all those years ago, and I took it on holiday with me, with my laptop. I didn't plan to do any coding, but one night I thought I'd recreate a program I first wrote back in 1990, I think. It was the classic sentence builder program. You supply it with arrays of nouns, verbs, adverbs, adjectives, prepositions and conjunctions, and it churns out random, silly, but syntactically correct, sentences.

The kids had great fun running it and plugging in new words. And I felt that it was in some way educational for them - learning a little bit about grammar. Plus I was chuffed that I could still write C code.

So that's pretty much why I'm interested in C#. I pricked up my ears when I first heard about it a couple or so years ago, and I'd like to have some level of proficiency in a language other than Perl. Perl is always going to be more useful to me than C# - just because of what I do for a living and what Perl is very good at doing - but it would be nice to have a second string to my programming bow.

Needless to say, I've been reading up on the subject. I came across this useful website:
http://www.csharpfriends.com