Let’s start with something simple: an immutable stack.

Now, immediately I hear the objection: a stack is by its very nature something that changes. A stack is an abstract data type with the interface

void Push(T t);
T Pop();
bool IsEmpty { get; }

You push stuff onto it, you pop stuff off of it, it changes. How can it be immutable?

I said in an earlier post that I believe that immutable objects are the way of the future in C#. I stand by that statement while at the same time noting that it is at this point sufficiently vague as to be practically meaningless! “Immutable” means different things to different people; different kinds of immutability have different pros and cons. I’d like to spend some time over the next few weeks talking about possible directions that C# could go to improve the developer experience when writing programs that use immutable objects, as well as giving some practical examples of the sort of immutable object programming you can do today.