Java or C#, which to start with.

philjohn · 11 May 2009 at 14:08

mleanz1 said:
Ive programmed in C
its not to hard to get to grips with!

no, but it's easy to shoot yourself in the foot with.

NathanE · 11 May 2009 at 14:12

Mono have a lot of the 3.5 bits in development. It's not easy shadowing everything Microsoft does with just a few developers spread out over the globe...

It's built to Microsoft's specifications for .NET, surely that is good enough?

Sure we all want Microsoft to bring out their own offering with sterling documentation and support and what not. But that just isn't going to happen in the forseeable is it. The fact is that .NET is fundamentally designed to port across platforms well. It is just that Microsoft themselves haven't yet exploited it all that much. They are starting to with Silverlight, but that's just scratching the surface of what .NET can do.

And VS Pro is nothing on VS TS... it's stating the obvious really. You spouted some FUD about .NET costing £££ to develop on. I've factually stated that this is bull ****.

I don't pretend to have a "clue about you" nor do I really want one

It's just glaringly obvious from what you've posted that you're speaking a load of FUD about .NET.

Dj_Jestar · 11 May 2009 at 14:18

And it's totally obvious from what you have posted that you can't take a flippant comment for what it is, and also quick to jump on the defensive..

dangerstat · 11 May 2009 at 20:33

Talon said:
Well I've spent ages reading through posts and I still can't decide.

I would like to try pick up some programming but can't decide between the two listed. I have a couple of friend that program in Java, but the company I work for mainly use C# and C++.....

Someone give me a push one way or another

Cheers.

Hi there Talon, whilst the others argue, I thought I'd give you my opinion.

Firstly learning any language will help you out with learning any other. C++ or Java it makes little difference, they are both similar "level" wise. For numerical applications I'd always edge towards C and C++ because basically in almost every task I've done involving numerical calculations C++ and C have been much faster (only ever challenged by Fortran for matrix stuff).

My "beef" with Java is it's quite tricky to do standard GUI work, I don't like swing and even with a decent IDE (like eclipse with the visual addon or netbeans) it's messy at best. To be honest (and I feel dirty saying it!) I prefer Visual Studio (VC++) for this type of work (I guess that's .Net now!), both generate "auto code" but for because of the maturity of the MS products they've been built for people that develop GUI based applications.

In summary I tend to use Java for everything I do now, because it just fits the way I think more than C/C++ does. I'd recommend (as has been suggested) downloading a few compilers g++ and gcj from the GNU project and try then and see what works for you.

Inquisitor · 11 May 2009 at 20:45

dangerstat said:
Firstly learning any language will help you out with learning any other. C++ or Java it makes little difference, they are both similar "level" wise. For numerical applications I'd always edge towards C and C++ because basically in almost every task I've done involving numerical calculations C++ and C have been much faster (only ever challenged by Fortran for matrix stuff).

To be honest, applications in which performance is really that important are fairly rare, and if you find yourself writing one then you'll probably already know which language you need to use (unless you're a scientist who just needs to do some number crunching and has little/no understanding of programming

)

dangerstat said:
My "beef" with Java is it's quite tricky to do standard GUI work, I don't like swing and even with a decent IDE (like eclipse with the visual addon or netbeans) it's messy at best. To be honest (and I feel dirty saying it!) I prefer Visual Studio (VC++) for this type of work (I guess that's .Net now!), both generate "auto code" but for because of the maturity of the MS products they've been built for people that develop GUI based applications.

Yep, Visual Studio has without a doubt some of the best GUI facilities, especially with the introduction of WPF, which allows for declarative GUI creation.

In relation to Talon's post, though, I think C# is a more sensible choice than Java simply because it's what his company uses (and for .NET's excellent GUI capabilities). C# is also better suited to general application development than C++ is; like I said above, you'll rarely find yourself needing the extra "power" of C++ over the convenience of C#.