Great Article on the True Nature of LINQ in C#

In the early days of C# 3.0, Microsoft distributed a whitepaper which walked through the rationale behind the additions to language, how the language changes related to the syntax options, and what it could be used for.

Among the key applications ... perhaps a co-evolved objective ... for the new constructs was LINQ ... of the to-SQL, to-XML, and over-Objects varieties.

As Visual Studio 2008 and C# 3.0 has moved out into wide use, though, that background has faded away and instead one sees a ton of quick examples and how-tos about LINQ and database operations that give the impression it's all some kind of fancy SQL trick.

Which is why I really liked this article on 7 Tricks to Simplify Your Programs with LINQ.

The only thing I didn't love was the name, because it's not really LINQ that Igor is talking about, it's the awesome functional programming features under the hood ... which happen to enable LINQ.

Igor shows how the underlying extension method and lamba constructs let you do the cool Lisp (ok, Ruby) tricks with C#, and he does it without getting into explaining what all the machinery is or even what it's called. Those explanations are important to be sure, but having these quick (2-3 lines!), powerful examples communicates a lot at first glance to readers who may not want to read about all the CS issues right away.

Furthermore, Igor avoids examples featuring the slightly misleading SQLesque syntactic sugar that can cloud what's really happening... until his last example.

Which is very useful, because the busy developer-on-the-run seeing a LINQ example doesn't realize that the select/from/where stuff are not magic language keywords. They're just an alternate way of saying Foo.Where or Foo.Select. They're just extension methods that happen to be fairly fundamental to working with lists and sets.

Maybe Igor even gets some folks who thought C# had somehow sucked in SQL to realize that, instead, all the time they've been writing complex SQL queries, they've actually been doing that functional programming stuff they've been hearing so much about. And now they can "think the same way" in C#.