C# To Crush Java?

Hector73 writes: "Cringely predicts that C# will blow away Java in the upcoming years. He raises some good points, but fails to differentiate between client-side Java vs server-side Java. I believe the bells have tolled for SWING, but server-side Java is holding strong."

Comments

Not Likely.

[fava]

One thing you must remember before writing Java off compleatly is that Java is the language being taught to most University CS students, I cannot see all these recent graduates deciding to abandon Java in favor of C#.

As well many companies that are using Java are doing so primarly because it is portable. C# lacks that feature.

Re:Not Likely.

[Hector73]

One thing you must remember before writing Java off compleatly is that Java is the language being taught to most University CS students

So was PASCAL ...

At the risk of stating the obvious....

[pwagland]

We all know that Microsoft make great marketing solutions. Sometimes, these are even really great products. But the key point here is, as Cringley said, microsoft will market C# better than Sun did Java. And because it is marketed better it will get mindshare. And once it gets mindshare, it will get marketshare. One step at a time...

However, C# is still windows centric. To a lot of people this means diddly squat. If it allows you to work more easily to your target platform, then people will use it. Witness the success of Visual Basic as proof. And that thing is a cow if you ever have to maintain the "code" that gets produced with it.

This is not all bad news however. Despite the success of VB, there is still a "niche" market for C programmers. Just as there will be for Java programmers. And the split will go roughly the same way I think. On non-microsoft and server platforms Java will continue to be used. On the "frontend" microsoft boxes then C# will become the new Visual Basic...

And sure, we "profressionals" will deride these "sellouts", and pretend that we are somehow superiour. But in reality, it is just people using the most appropiate tools for the job at hand.

I agree...but I don't

[MrBlack]

I agree. Microsoft has put a huge ammount of effort into developing a quality platform in .NET, and they are betting the farm (or at least appearing to do so) on .NET. Certainly if .NET flops MS will lose face, and lots of money, but I don't really see the success or failure of .NET affecting their core monopolies. Windows and Office. I see this as MS's attempt at condsolodating their stock in the server arena, which is where other vendors like Oracle and Sun have been traditionally strong. Server-side Java rocks, and that's where MS is attacking.

Re:My letter to Bob

[ban]

I may be completely stupid but I happen to work at a company that is developing a server side VM for Java and I really don't understand what you mean with "the branch prediction problem".

Are you assuming that static compilers do some kind of interprocedural or whole program analysis? This is normally not the case.

Do you think that you can't do inlining or method specialization where you take runtime information into account in a JIT? You definitely can.

Our VM does advanced optimizations at runtime that amongst other things take single implementations of methods into account. These optimizations can be undone at runtime when new classes are loaded that invalidate the assumptions that the optimizations are based upon.

This means that you won't do virtual dispatches to methods that only have a single implementation.

Try to do that with a static compiler for a dynamic language.

Bogus, all cause of one analogy...

[FortKnox]

J2EE

C# has nothing that can compair to J2EE. The bonus' you get with J2EE in a large-scale system will easily destroy anything .NET can come up with.