70s coders learn C, Pascal, COBOL(one of the best IT jobs in economic crisis)
80s coders learn C
90s coders learn C++, Java, Delphi
21-century (long time no see this hot word during 1999-2001) coders learn C#?

• A homemade rumor by anonymous craven

On PDC 2008, Anders, former architecture of Turbo Pascal, Delphi, Visual J++, currently the father of C#, gives us a presentation “The Future of C#” about what new features C# 4.0 will have. The demo “Compiler as a service” is really cool. Think about the prompt “C# >”.

Mads Torgersen, C# Language PM gives a public released document on C# Future site, describes four main new features:

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> ##### Dynamic lookup
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Dynamic lookup allows you to write method, operator and indexer calls, property and field accesses, and even object invocations which bypass the C# static type checking and instead gets resolved at runtime.

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> ##### Named and optional parameters
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Parameters in C# can now be specified as optional by providing a default value for them in a member declaration. When the member is invoked, optional arguments can be omitted. Furthermore, any argument can be passed by parameter name instead of position.

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> ##### COM specific interop features
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Dynamic lookup as well as named and optional parameters both help making programming against COM less painful than today. On top of that, however, we are adding a number of other small features that further improve the interop experience.

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> ##### Variance
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It used to be that an IEnumerable wasn’t an IEnumerable

My comments:

features
benefit
side effect

Dynamic lookup	dynamic (runtime type detection) versus var (compile time type inference) introduced in C#3.0. No handwritten reflection codes any more.	No IntelliSense when programming. Difficult to defend unknown runtime exceptions, errors.
Named and optional parameters	ease function call of COM interop like VSTO, etc.	Named parameters looks Pythonic. But maybe Jim like this?
COM specific interop features	based on previous two new features, it’s easier. The biggest benefit: no runtime PIA more!	N/A? Time to migrate old workaround code.
Variance	more friendly	as above.

These new features certainly relies on new .NET framework. At least, dynamic is not a language sugar like var.

Overall, C# is becoming more and more free-style language, combined compile-time and run-time power. It’s worthy to take a look at what C# will be if you are a C# developer or even a Java, C++ lover. Write less, do more. That’s the best value of the C# evolution, IMO.