Why I love C#
BASIC was my first love. Notice the all caps -- that was how it was written back in the 80s. I discovered BASIC via a GW-BASIC manual I had found in my grandfather's boarding house, where a former tenant left it after graduation. From that lost book I was introduced to programming, and I moved from GW to QBASIC then to Visual Basic 4, jumping to VB 6 and finally, VB.NET. Visual Basic was my first foray into .NET, and with my skills back then, it was really, really good.
Along the way I met a bunch of other languages, though. In highschool we were also taught a data-oriented language called Clipper, and a weird semicolon-laden language called Pascal. It was the first time I saw line-terminators in a programming language. In college I finally got to meet C. Quite different a beast from BASIC, I nonetheless got the hang of C very quickly. It was terse, requiring fewer keystrokes to write in (there was no Intellisense back then) and I immediately kept all the keywords I needed in my head. It was great, but I didn't get to use it at once when I started working.
In the early years of .NET I was ambivalent between the choice of languages. I learned both Visual Basic and C# and said to myself -- what's the big deal between the two? Nothing much. So I just studied and learned and switched from one language to another, until one day I got introduced to object-oriented programming. OOP was a difficult, disciplined programming concept -- much harder to internalize than structured programming was. But that's where I saw what C# was good at: it was naturally geared towards OOP. I compared writing applications in both languages, and noticed that if I was doing OOP, it would be much faster if I wrote it in C#.
I had one last foray using VB.NET on a full-blown object-oriented designed application, and it just convinced me further that C# was the way to go. What nailed it further for me was when .NET 2.0, and then .NET 3.5 arrived. It was much easier to use and write generics, I could use anonymous methods (which wasn't possible in VB early on), LINQ was without hassles of unsightly underscores, and lambda expressions were just much more intuitively beautiful in C#. Likewise, with the ability to introduce unmanaged code, developers could also introduce more advanced tweaks that are impossible to include with VB.
C# empowers a .NET developer to realize the full potential of the .NET framework, aside from the language. This power becomes even bigger with the introduction of the dynamic keyword in C# 4.0, giving it the best of both worlds between static-typed and dynamic-typed languages. It is this power that convinced me that C# is the way to go.
So, why do you love C#? Why don't you like/love it? I'd love to hear your thoughts too. :)