[ale] Hello World - in C# - in Mono - in Ubuntu is done

Pat Regan thehead at patshead.com
Fri Sep 17 00:03:55 EDT 2010


On Thu, 16 Sep 2010 23:27:06 -0400
"Michael B. Trausch" <mike at trausch.us> wrote:

> On Thu, 2010-09-16 at 22:25 -0400, Ron Frazier wrote:
> > C++ - 11 jobs
> > C# - 57 jobs
> > Java - 106 jobs
> 
> I'd like to point out that this is hardly representative and is quite
> likely completely irrelevant.  You'll probably find very few openings
> for COBOL programmers, I would expect, but they are in demand---after
> all, they're all dying!

This is awesome!  I sure hope more of them are RETIRING instead of
DYING :).

> Don't stop at a single programming language.  That has to be my most
> important piece of advice.  Programmers are _programmers_.  A good
> programmer can, after having learned two or three languages, pick up
> other languages (perhaps with the exception of insane languages, such
> as LISP and other so-called "functional" languages) with relative
> ease.  If you learn C fluently, you gain the ability to easily pick
> up and run with C++, C#, Java, Vala, and other languages that are in
> that family. If you learn C and GObject, you will likely manage your
> resources better and maybe even better understand the limitations and
> practical applications of the type systems that you use in whatever
> language you are working in.

I didn't read this whole message and I wasn't going to respond to
anything else.  But...  I saw this paragraph as I was deleting the rest
of the quoted text, so...  :)

I've been wanting to learn lisp for years.  My editor (emacs) and my
window manager (sawfish) are both written in and extended with lisp.
I've been using sawfish for at least 6-8 years and I ran emacs on my
386 that ran Linux.  I still only write short bits of lisp and they
still flow like C code with too many parens...

I'm going to disagree with you about C preparing you for C++, C#, or
Java.  There's a big conceptual leap moving from C to an object
oriented language.  Moving from one OO language to the next should be
easy.  Moving from any of those OO languages to C should be easy.
Going the other way will be significantly harder.

Pat


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