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Developer's Corner / Re: Seeking your insightful advice...Where to start?
« Last post by Renegade on February 28, 2007, 10:59 AM »How is it that nobody is endorsing Fortran? 
How sad!
OK - I haven't really programmed in Fortran in over 15 years, but it's the language for matH and still used quite a bit. I remember talking to a military programmer who did stuff with combat simulations (tactical, strategic, theatre), and everything was done in Fortran - which makes sense when you're doing a lot of calculations. There's even Fortran for .NET (VS 2003).
I tend towards C# as it's just easy for me. I've done a lot in VB.NET before and it's very very easy as well.
I'm not worried about MS dominating the planet - in fact I hope they do. MS is very friendly towards small developers and their tools are much easier to use than gcc (vomit).
For me programming is about productivity. I'm basically just a user at heart, and I am only interested in getting things done NOW (my ADHD prevents me from having any kind of attention span that requires me to wait). C# (or VB.NET for that matter) fit the bill for getting things done fast. Yes - I complain about things too, but I'd probably commit suicide if I were using Delphi (vomit again). Delphi has been abandoned, and has serious issues that will never be resolved now. Other languages might be more efficient in some aspects, but for just plain getting stuff done, it's pretty hard to beat C#.
But for certain kinds of development, other languages will be much better than C#. e.g. You can't beat a low level language when you do low level network programming, so you're better off with C there. For math you've got Fortran or MatLAB. For cross platform, you've got... Oh yeah - they all suck there! But Microsoft has the right idea with the CLI/CLS/CL something or other.
As for web based applications... Barf... They're all still infantile and the infrastructure for them is non-existant. You cannot do any kind of math or heavy iteration on a server. You need the power of a client. Nobody has anything that can do video or audio rendering in a web application. It's just stupid to try that at the moment. (The future may change this, but right now these things are way out of reach.)
C++, well, I think that it's pretty much the "jack-of-all-trades" language. It does darn near anything, but you run into the problem of it being slower to develop in.
D - Not sure - sounds interesting. The problem I see with a language like D is that it doesn't have wide adoption, so when you run into a problem, you have no community to fall back on.
The language war thing is really just silly. Whatever works is best. I just like the C# flavour.
Blah - Time for me to get to sleep. I've got coding to do in the morning!
How sad! OK - I haven't really programmed in Fortran in over 15 years, but it's the language for matH and still used quite a bit. I remember talking to a military programmer who did stuff with combat simulations (tactical, strategic, theatre), and everything was done in Fortran - which makes sense when you're doing a lot of calculations. There's even Fortran for .NET (VS 2003).
I tend towards C# as it's just easy for me. I've done a lot in VB.NET before and it's very very easy as well.
I'm not worried about MS dominating the planet - in fact I hope they do. MS is very friendly towards small developers and their tools are much easier to use than gcc (vomit).
For me programming is about productivity. I'm basically just a user at heart, and I am only interested in getting things done NOW (my ADHD prevents me from having any kind of attention span that requires me to wait). C# (or VB.NET for that matter) fit the bill for getting things done fast. Yes - I complain about things too, but I'd probably commit suicide if I were using Delphi (vomit again). Delphi has been abandoned, and has serious issues that will never be resolved now. Other languages might be more efficient in some aspects, but for just plain getting stuff done, it's pretty hard to beat C#.
But for certain kinds of development, other languages will be much better than C#. e.g. You can't beat a low level language when you do low level network programming, so you're better off with C there. For math you've got Fortran or MatLAB. For cross platform, you've got... Oh yeah - they all suck there! But Microsoft has the right idea with the CLI/CLS/CL something or other.
As for web based applications... Barf... They're all still infantile and the infrastructure for them is non-existant. You cannot do any kind of math or heavy iteration on a server. You need the power of a client. Nobody has anything that can do video or audio rendering in a web application. It's just stupid to try that at the moment. (The future may change this, but right now these things are way out of reach.)
C++, well, I think that it's pretty much the "jack-of-all-trades" language. It does darn near anything, but you run into the problem of it being slower to develop in.
D - Not sure - sounds interesting. The problem I see with a language like D is that it doesn't have wide adoption, so when you run into a problem, you have no community to fall back on.
The language war thing is really just silly. Whatever works is best. I just like the C# flavour.
Blah - Time for me to get to sleep. I've got coding to do in the morning!
)
(Gee - that was brilliant... 
)