[TriLUG] C# and .NET

[Chris Merrill]

Robby Dermody wrote:
 > since it's so much better than Java". If I knew my _interest_ and
 > _questions_ would cause this much strife by all the Java people, I would

I hope I didn't come across as flaming...if so, I apologize.
No strife here, at all.  Every project has different
requirements, right tool for the job, and all that  :)

Let me preface the rest of my comments with this fact:
I made my living with C++ for many years...I still like it, but
I'm much more productive in Java than in C++...and my
applications rarely require squeezing out every little
bit of performance.

<snip>
 > I see Java, C# and
> whatever else (maybe Python) as competing to be the dominant general-purpose
> language to continue to replace C (and possibly start to replace C++) in the
> next decade, give or take (??). 

I could be wrong here...but I would see Java replacing a greater
percentage of C++ work than C work.  For instance, writing an
OS or device drivers.  C is generally the way to go.  C++ doesn't
buy much here...and I sure woudln't want to do it in Java.  C may
very well continue to be more common than C++ in those realms.

As the level of abstraction increases, so does the viability of
Java.  I've never done serious graphics-intensive programming...but
from my varying assignments as a contractor, I percieve that to be
a very small segment of the overall programming world.  So while
I agree that C++ rules in the high-performance graphics world, there
isn't much work going there - relative to the entire programming
economy, that is.

For every company producing a graphically intensive software
product, there are 1000 that don't sell software at all - it is
a necessary requirement to doing business.  Java is exceptionally
well suited to this purpose - primarily due to the portability,
productivity and rich choice of tools/architectures.  Someone
mentioned that "web work" isn't the whole programming economy
and they're right.  It's the back-end business processing and
databases that runs the companies, regardless of the front-end
(fat-client, thin-client, 3270 or browser).  That is the
software that stays around for years (decades).  That is the
software the Java is very will suited for...and that is the
software that is mostly being written in Java today!

There is an absolutely _huge_ amount of software running
businesses today written in COBOL.  By some estimates, there
is _still_ more software running today in COBOL than most
other languages, combined!  What is it being (slowly) replaced
with?  Java.  And probably C#, when it's ready.  C and C++ are
not options there.  It's not that they couldn't do the
job...but the productivity gains of a simplified (and especially
garbage-collected) language are simply more important than
processing-efficiency in these labor-intensive conversions.

Cheers!
Chris

*********************************
Chris Merrill
cmerrill at nc.rr.com
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