The inclusion of lambdas is great, but not supporting full closures severely hampers their usefulness. Instead of using lambdas to use patterns like CPS (continuation passing style) or alternative object interfaces, lambdas just save you from typing extra characters.
It is always fun to watch other languages continue to implement features that bring them closer to lisp. I wonder how much longer it will be until every language is just a lisp dialect.
They are moving in the right direction but very slowly. It is impressive though that they have been able to still innovate without breaking backwards compatibility.
> It is impressive though that they have been able to still innovate without breaking backwards compatibility.
Indeed. The .NET IL compiler actually supports closures by generating a class with the lambda's method body as method on that class. That method takes in as parameters whatever outside variables need to be captured.
It also supports iterator continuations (e.g. "yield return") by generating an entire class which inherits off of IEnumerable and wraps your single function with all the necessary trappings to track the continuation state.
You can see this stuff by looking at C# assemblies in a free program called ILSpy[0]. Normally it'll reverse-engineer these compiler patterns, but if you uncheck all the "decompile" checkboxes in the options, it'll just straight-up translate the IL to C# and you can see the dirty tricks.
C# is quite impressive, especially in comparison to Java. If it had been released earlier, wasn't owned solely by Microsoft, and supported all major platforms equally, it could have been huge, even larger than Java. If C# had reversed roles with Java a significant portion of the world would have been more productive.
C# 1.0 was very close to being an exact copy of Java. To say that if C# had been released before Java it would have been more popular is nonsensical as it started life as copy-cat Java. Without Java there wouldn't be a C#. Later versions of C# added more features much faster than Java. Many Java developers have since moved on to Scala and other JVM languages which are more expressive than C#.
I'm not sure what you're getting at with CPS. How do Java's lambda's inhibit CPS? And what do you hope to accomplish with CPS, anyway? I could see you wanting tail-call optimization in order to make CPS useful, but that's a VM limitation, not a language limitation, and you could always trampoline anyway..
It is always fun to watch other languages continue to implement features that bring them closer to lisp. I wonder how much longer it will be until every language is just a lisp dialect.
They are moving in the right direction but very slowly. It is impressive though that they have been able to still innovate without breaking backwards compatibility.