Are Developers Using LINQ?

I had an interesting conversation with my nephew the other day.  He is a very bright CS student working as a summer intern at a software company (not Microsoft).  He is programming in C# using Visual Studio 2008.  I asked him if developers at his company were using LINQ, and he said, "No, that the folks in charge had basically forbidden it, because no one understands it."  Visual Studio 2008 has been out for over nearly a year, but I know that a fair number of competent developers have not devoted the time and effort to learn about the style of programming that LINQ enables.

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Blog TOCIt IS worth it to spend the time to learn about LINQ.  From comments I have received, I know that it takes only about eight to sixteen hours to work through my Functional Programming Tutorial.  This is a far smaller effort than even a single CS course at a university.  I know that I have saved that amount of time many times over in the last two years.  I write programs faster, and they work more reliably.  I have another blog post in mind that details exactly why programs written using LINQ have fewer bugs.  I'll get to it pretty soon.

 

From the conversations I've had, I also know that there are a fair number who do get it.  I receive comments from "typical" object-oriented developers who have read my Functional Programming tutorial, and have made the transition to the functional style of coding.  While it is a bit of a transition to think about programming in terms of transformations instead of algorithms, it isn't a difficult concept.  I think that this is analogous to the transition that we all made (if you are old, like me) to object oriented programming in the mid 80s.

 

It is possible to make the transition; I did so.  And there is a high return on investment for the time spent.  If you haven't done so yet, carve out a weekend, and work through the tutorial.

 

Some of the developers that I've spoken to have said that the functional programming course that they had to take when getting their CS degree was their least favorite course.  They felt that the concepts were difficult to understand, and they had to write using a syntax that they felt was strange.  Functional programming using C# 3.0 is a whole different animal from more "traditional" functional languages, such as Lisp, Haskell, Erlang, or Ocaml.  It really is much easier using C#.  The only really new syntax in C# is that of lambda expressions.

 

I'd like to take an informal poll about this.  Do developers at your company understand and use LINQ?  Do you?  Can you see the benefit?  Please leave a comment on this post, and let me (and others) know about the use of LINQ in your development efforts.