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Which Language To Learn?
LordStormes writes "I've been a Java/C++/PHP developer for about 6 years now. However, I'm seeing the jobs for these languages dry up, and Java in particular is worrisome with all the Oracle nonsense going on. I think it's time to pick up a new language or risk my skills fading into uselessness. I'm looking to do mostly Web-based back-end stuff. I've contemplated Perl, Python, Ruby, Erlang, Go, and several other languages, but I'll put it to you — what language makes the most sense now to get the jobs? I've deliberately omitted .NET — I have no desire to do the Microsoft languages."
Is this a joke? Microsoft are less relevant by the day and "skilled .NET coders"... that's the single most amusing phrase I've heard in months.
When I write in perl I can't even decompile the code I wrote myself 5 minutes earlier. It's eerie. It's like a one way hash for logic..
"I like teaching."
Why were you whinning, then?
Not to mention that if he is working 7:30am to 7:30pm, there is a competency issue involved. It's not like he is claiming to be teaching creative writing where there are pages upon pages of text to read. It is math. School is in for 6-7 hours a day. That includes breaks and lunch. He is claiming that it takes him 5 to 6 hours each day to grade papers and prepare for the next day. That is with giving him the benefit of the doubt that he spends the entire class every day actively interacting with the students (as opposed to assigning them work and doing prep while they work), he has no teachers aids, and he has classes every period during the school day.
When I went to school, classes ran for 5 hours, with an hour lunch. Most teachers had students working as 'assistants' for doing grunt paper grading (which is particularly well suited to math), and 2 of the 6 periods each day the teachers had no class so that they could do the things every teacher claims they do all night and all summer.
So, even if we give him the benefit of the doubt that he does not have it as well as virtually every teacher I had in school, we still have to question his competency in not being able to complete his work in a reasonable amount of time.
I am with the poster, I will never ever touch .NET. Microsofties have been saying VB (or its latest incarnation .NET) will kill all the other languages for decades. Still hasn't happened and it won't. It is ok for SME owners wanting to put a nice GUI on their Access database, but real software engineers do not get held hostage unnecessarily by a monopolist. For web based apps, look at PHP and Python, possibly Ruby.
Phillip.
Property for sale in Nice, France
Yeah. With Perl, remember: There's More Than One Way To Do It. And 80% of them suck. :b
The World Wide Web is dying. Soon, we shall have only the Internet.
Have you ever seen an organic farming class ? At least here they use some sort of fertilizer that clearly did not come from animals (don't know what it *is* though). When asked, this was because the real thing smells and makes your hands dirty ...
They also don't ever work a patch bigger than a few square meters, hard labour is definitely not part of the training.
Look, you can always count on a "small liberal arts college", esp. a progressively slanted one, to cheat and give a "fake" education. I cannot imagine these kids being ready to become farmers. I doubt they could do it, even if they wanted. "Organic farming", at least here, is a fraud. These kids can maybe grow a garden to produce 10% of their own needs (and yes, more people should do that, but it can't replace farming). They can't do more than that.