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I wonder where VB.NET sits, considering it's actually better than C#?

RM:

"Do you think education is the answer to developing better software and that somehow we get out from the 'we must do it first no matter how buggy it is' way of thinking?"

BS:

"Education is part the answer, an essential part, but 'education' itself is not a solution. We need an education for software developers that combine principles from science and engineering with practical skills. Most likely, we will need several specializations, hopefully with a common base. Unfortunately, I am not at all sure that the fields of computer science, software engineering, IT, whatever, are mature enough to agree on such a principled common base and specialisations. I also suspect that such a degree would be a master's rather than a bachelor's.

Currently, we have another problem: students often leave educational establishments with a set of skills that are seriously misaligned to what the industry needs. We can argue that maybe industry should ask for something different, but there is a lot of hasty re-training and un-learning going on at the handover from education to industry. I think this is really bad for both sides. It discourages industry from relying on more than basic skills and puts an emphasis on tools and techniques that can be used by relatively unskilled labour. Students know that and therefore pay less attention to higher-level skills and some of the best students chose what they perceive as more challenging fields, such as physics and biology.

Perhaps his decades of experience in not only teaching, but writing software will get your ear in a way that my decades of experience in both writing, evaluating, and teaching software hasn't.

Normalization is not just some plot by database programmer to annoy application programmers (That is merely a satisfying side effect!)

True Chuck Moore facts:

Chuck Moore wrote his own VLSI chip design system. In Forth.

And you may not want to use the .net framework for enterprise applications. The large object heap of the .net framework fragments and does not get cleaned up. This can cause any long-running application to fail with "out of memory" exceptions, although little memory is actually allocated.

There's a nicely detailed article describing the problem. My colleage has already provided this feedback. As you can see, he's quite pissed. And reasonably so.

no, it wouldn't be dissimilar to a java stack on top of Solaris. Unfortunately, they already tried to solve the problem the same way an enterprise Java app would - by throwing lots more servers at it. The run the whole thing on 100 HP Proliants!

But otherwise, yes, a realtime OS wouldn't necessarily be the correct solution, but on the other hand - who said it had to be cluster? A group of RTOS servers in a load balanced scenario with shared-nothing data. As the servers are spread over London, a cluster wouldn't handle it, you'd need some direct connectivity and an architecture that could cope with any server or group of servers dying at any time, without downtime or pauses - clusters don't ten to do that, they pause a little while they reconfigure the system. So considering the current system isn;t a traditional cluster, there's no reason why a RTOS couldn't be employed.

You must read this.