C# vs Ceylon

C# runs on top of the .NET framework, which provides many libraries containing classes used for common tasks such as connecting to the Internet, displaying a window or editing files. Unlike many other languages, you don't have to pick between a handful of libraries for every small task you want to do.

Where other languages invoke the feeling of being a product of organic growth over time, C# just feels like an incredibly well-designed language where everything has its purpose and almost nothing is non-essential.

On Windows, Visual Studio is the recommended C# IDE. It provides a very flexible GUI that you can rearrange the way you want and many useful features such as refactorings (rename a variable, extract some code into a method, ...) and code formatting (you can pick exactly how you want the code to be formatted).

Visual Studio also highlights your errors when you compile, making your debug sessions more efficient since you don't have to run the code to see the mistakes. There's also a powerful debugger that allows you to execute the code step-by-step and even change what part of the code will be executed next. In addition to giving you all the line-by-line information you'll need in a hassle-free manner, Visual Studio has stuff you can click on in the errors window that will take you to the documentation for that error, saving you several minutes of web searching.

In addition to all of this, Visual Studio has an intuitive, intelligent, and helpful graphical user interface designer that generates code for you (the best of WYSIWYG, in my opinion), which is helpful for new programmers. Being able to create a fantastic-looking UI with one's mouse and then optionally tweak with code helps make programming fun for beginner developers.

Visual Studio also has the best code completion --Intellisense is every bit as intelligent as the name says it is. It, as well as VS's parameter hinting, is context-, type-, user-, and position-sensitive, and displays relevant completions in a perfectly convenient yet understandable order. This feature allows a new programmer to answer the questions "What does this do?" and "How do I use it?" right then and there rather than having to switch to a browser to read through extensive documentation. This allows the programmer to satisfy their curiosity before it is snuffed out by several minutes of struggling through exhaustive documentation.

And for the more adventurous and text-ready developer, Microsoft does the best job of ensuring that everything, from interfaces and wildcard types down to Console.WriteLine("") and the + operator, is well-documented and easy to understand, with relevant and well-explained usage examples that manage to be bite-size yet complete, simple yet truly helpful. The reference site is easy to navigate, well-organized, clean and uncluttered, up-to-date, and fresh and enjoyable to look at, and every page is well-written with consideration for readers who are not C# experts yet want to read about changing the console background color.

The best part? It's free! Visual C# Express contains all of the features described above, at zero cost. If you are a student, you can probably get Visual Studio Professional from your university, which also includes tools for unit testing and supports plugins.

C# is primarily object-oriented, but it also supports some features typically found in functional languages such as lambdas, delegates and anonymous classes. Methods can be treated like any other object, and the Linq query system operates on monads with lazy evaluation (though it hides this with a lot of syntactic sugar).

You don't need to use these features to code in C#, though, so you can start with OOP and then learn about them.

Object-oriented programming is the most widely-used paradigm. C# offers support for common OOP features such as classes, methods and fields, plus some features not found in competing languages like properties, events and static classes.

C# code is much more readable thanks to the syntactic sugar it offers. You can truly concentrate on your code, not on the way it's implemented.

C# is clearly the best choice for Windows programs. The .NET framework contains everything you need to build great-looking apps, without having to learn the confusing Win32 API or download a ton of external libraries. C# can also be used to build Windows 8's "modern" apps.

C#'s been around for just the right amount of time, is regularly updated with useful additions, is versatile, easy to write & read, & has excellent tooling support. This means it is a top choice for many organizations & will remain so for the foreseeable future.

You can code at the high level without worrying about pointers and memory management, but if you so choose you can switch to lower level programming with direct memory management and pointer manipulation (though you need to compile to specifically allow this).

Visual studio has embraced cross platform development over the past 3 years. With Visual Studio Code, you now have a light, and quick IDE variant available for free as well.

With CORE you are no longer just limited to Windows, so a language worth learning.

C# can be used for Windows apps, Linux apps, OS X apps, Windows 8 "modern" apps, websites, games, iPhone apps, Android apps, Windows Phone apps, and more.

If you want to create a cross-platform application, you can share most of the code and write one GUI for each platform.

With .NET core it is a truly universal programming language which support desktop apps (Windows), Mobile apps (Xamarin), Web Apps (ASP.Core MVC). Also is perfectly fit to serverless programming for micro services. Soon it will be also support Web assembly (Blazor).

Unity provides a selection of programming languages depending on preference or knowledge - C#, JS, Boo and UnityScript. C# is arguably the most powerful with better syntax and stronger language structure. It allows using script files without attaching them to any game object (classes, methods inside unattached scripts that can be used at any time). There are more tutorials and information for C# than UnityScript and Visual Studio can be used to code for unity in C#. Additionally, learning C# allows using it outside of Unity as well unlike UnityScript.

It has a Web IDE: http://try.ceylon-lang.org/ with impressive demos: http://try.ceylon-lang.org/?gist=bd41b47f325b6d32514a so you can try it without installing anything, and see the JS generation / interop in action.

The compiler prevents you from using a potentially null variable, unless you check it is not null. Ie. it forces you to check a potentially null value before using it.
The type system is strict, but flexible, allowing union and intersection of types, covariant and contravariant types, reified types, etc.
Type inference and union types allows a dynamic programming style, close of JS spirit.

It brings type safety to JS, allowing to define interfaces to existing JS APIs, yet using the dynamic keyword for flexible calls in the JS ecosystem.

Ceylon has reified generics, so it doesn't loose the type of collections at runtime. This makes autocompletion, debugging, etc. first-class. The Eclipse plugin makes it a full-fledged Ceylon IDE, and an IntelliJ IDEA plugin is in the works.

Gavin King, main author of the language, has a great, clear technical writing style, making understandable difficult concepts like variance or sound type system.

The language specification is very complete and up to date; also, the language module is very well documented.

Ceylon has special language-level support for interoperation with dynamically typed languages like JavaScript, and its module system even interoperates with npm.

Ceylon is indeed fairly easy and readable. Of course those ones who know OOP and a bit of functional programming concepts will feel almost at home right from the start.

HTML generation is supported right in the SDK.

If you don't use platform-specific features, you can reuse the same code in your backend server (be it in Java or JavaScript) and in your client-side browser code, for example for storing data, validating input etc.