[Gllug] OT(ish): Advice

[Simon Stewart]

On Friday, Dec 6, 2002, at 12:47 Europe/London, Matthew Thompson wrote:

> Much though you and others may find this dis-tasteful I am going to  
> suggest Microsoft's .NET languages. Mostly VB.net and C#.net

And Java. J2EE is a big nasty mess, but get to grips with Servlets  
(which is Not Hard) and you'll have a huge chunk of what people  
actually use under your belt. The Wrox book called something like  
"Professional J2EE Programming, 1.3 edition" is a real treasure for  
this.

The advantage that java offers (apart from the fact that you can start  
developing on it for free, and everything works on multiple platforms  
from the word go, and that you're not tied into one provider, and that  
there's loads of interesting research projects that have extended the  
language, and that most Linux distros have packages to add support for  
it easily) is that it's a lot more mature than .Net, so it has lots of  
tools that save you time and a large body of programmers who are able  
to help, should you need a hand.

Okay, when you're starting you probably don't care about the tools, but  
once you've started using the language you'll become more and more  
reliant on them, cos they save you _so_ much time.

And you can run a load of different languages on top of the JVM, so you  
can take some of your scripting skills with you:

http://grunge.cs.tu-berlin.de/~tolk/vmlanguages.html

Current rumour on the blog-mill is that the .NET CLR is also a dog when  
it comes to implementing scripting languages, which is a bit of a pity  
(honestly: anything that makes it possible for smart people to carry  
their existing skills with them when they move to different platforms  
is a Great Thing)

http://www.citi.qut.edu.au/research/plas/projects/cp_files/ 
virtual_machines.pdf

Cheers,

Simon


-- 
Gllug mailing list  -  Gllug at linux.co.uk
http://list.ftech.net/mailman/listinfo/gllug