SRAM and storing strings

Arudino is a much bigger memory hog than C# or Java on a non-embedded system (desktop/server).

What does that mean? 'Arduino' isn't a non-embedded system. Show me a C# program (I still write C# occasionally, having done it solidly for a couple of years for my job) that will run in 2K of ram. Even the .net micro framework requires 64K.