Yes, the author of the FP article does have an agenda. So does Al Gore (the movie he made does make a clear statement about how he feels about the current debate). Neither one of them is doing the research themselves, they are both attempting to bring attention to research other people are doing that supports their side of the debate. I'm guessing that he wasn't the author of the "report last month, released along with a petition signed by 32,000 U. S. scientists", he is merely bringing attention to it.
This does not take in to account bioDIVERSITY. While we may be increasing crop density, causing giant algol blooms, is monoculture something that we really want?
FTFAs:
As summarized in a report last month, released along with a petition signed by 32,000 U. S. scientists who vouched for the benefits of CO2: "Higher CO2 enables plants to grow faster and larger and to live in drier climates. Plants provide food for animals, which are thereby also enhanced. The extent and diversity of plant and animal life have both increased substantially during the past half-century."
Well, that's odd. I must say that I am surprised to learn that the people raising the ever increasing supply of organic products at my local grocery store aren't making any money. I had no idea there were so many philanthropists in the agriculture business.
...presumed innocent. They are not necessarily interchangeable. If everyone assumed he was innocent there wouldn't be any point in looking for evidence, right?
Assume: To take for granted; accept without verification or proof; "I assume his train was late" Presume: To take for granted as being true in the absence of proof to the contrary: "We presumed she was innocent."
I believe the GP was talking about voting out the people who passed the laws obligating the phone company to collect the data in the first place. TFA is a little short on detail, but it sounds like, far from having broken the law, the telephone company was actually complying with the law by collecting this data. There is no mention about whether laws were broken in sharing the data with the researchers who performed this particular study. However, the point remains that somebody is legally required to have this data, and whomever that "somebody" is, they have this same ability to track individual users. And now, thanks to this research, we understand the implications of that.
The problem with JavaScript has nothing to do with the language itself, the problem is that no two browser implement it quite the same way. Adding another language that's only supported in a proprietary and still not very widespread plugin isn't going to help that one bit.
Browser compatibility aside, JavaScript is actually very solid and is a great language to program in for people who actually bother to learn it (unless you are really stuck up about static typing or class based OO, in which case, sorry...) Why so many people work so hard in trying to convert Ruby or Java into JavaScript (e.g. RJS or GWT) or make JavaScript look like a language that it isn't (e.g. ASP.NET AJAX) rather than just learning the damn language I will never figure out.
This of course brings me to JavaScript's second biggest problem - it's users. Why is it that JavaScript, apparently alone among languages, can attract so many programmers that have absolutely no desire to even try to learn the language? I've heard people who programmed professionally in JavaScript for years claim that it doesn't support inheritance. In any other OO language that would be the sort of thing that a new programmer would learn in the first week. Most experienced programmers when learning a new language would sit down with a book or a quickstart guide or tutorial of some sort and learn at least the basics of the language before they tried to take on a meaningful project, but apparently with JavaScript it's OK to just jump in and learn as little as you have to as you go along.
Military grade weapons doesn't necessarily have to mean bombs. In fact there are a number of countries in the world where people are free to own "military grade weapons" (e.g. military issue assault rifles) and there are some where every adult male is required to.
He didn't sue George Bush, he subpoenaed him, as well as his brother Jeb. I forget the details exactly, but he basically subpoenaed a whole laundry list of high profile people from the "religious right" hoping to get them to take his side in some court case he was involved in. Not one of them would get involved.
It's a bad sign when your closest ideological allies won't touch you with a 10 foot pole.
The first house I lived in had about 30 apple trees on the property. I believe they were Red Delicious or something similar, but I can't remember for sure; it was well over 20 years ago now that I lived there, and I was pretty young at the time. But I do still remember how much better those were than any apple you can buy in a store. I ate apples all the time as a kid, and I still like them, but about the only ones that I am willing to buy at the grocery store are granny smith. They are about the only ones that are crisp enough for me to enjoy eating. Occasionally I'll buy Gala apples, but even those seem to be hit or miss.
I am pretty sure that almost all produce grown on a large scale for sale in American supermarkets is grown for consistency and attractiveness over any other feature. Personally, I consider that to be a more valid reason to buy organic produce than any of the concerns about chemical fertilizers. Organic produce (at least organic fruits) tend to be much more flavorful than their non-organic brethren even if they don't look nearly as attractive.
They are actually pretty good at what they do, but they are also in a bit of a cyclical industry and they apparently like to clean house when things slow down. In particular, they seem to have a tendency to let go people who have been around for a long time (and therefore have high salaries) but aren't on the track to be an associate, so that they can replace them with somebody new (and therefore cheaper) the next time things pick up. I think office politics plays a role as well, as I know several people that work there or worked there have noticed that people who don't get along well with certain project managers are disproportionately more likely to get laid off.
I figured the implementation was different than what I was describing, but my point remains that, unlike the GGP, most Americans shouldn't be that utterly confused by the concept of turning off an outlet.
I hadn't the slightest idea what a UK power outlet looked like until just now, but I've been seeing / hearing people use the phrase "switching things off at the outlet" or similar for probably two years now, and I don't think I was ever once confused as to what they meant when they said it. So saying that Americans "don't have the slightest notion of this concept" seems a bit much to me.
Plus, if you want to make sure the students aren't using Excel in your own classes, just give them a problem that has more than 32768 data points (although I heard this may not work anymore with 2007?) I had a professor who did this once. About half of the class never turned it in because "It would crash Excel" or "Excel won't handle that many rows" or something similar. Of course, the professor never told us how we were expected to complete the assignment; all you had to do was log into any UNIX (the computers in the lab for that class were all IRIX, so this was not really a stretch) and run "sort datafile | uniq -c". From there, you could either use one of a number of *NIX based graphing tools, if you familiar with them, or copy the new smaller dataset into Excel to draw the actual chart. But many people in the class just assumed that because they were asked to draw a chart, they were supposed to use Excel, and when that didn't work, they were lost.
Mind you, this was in a 400 level CS course, so anyone in the class should have been able to write a program themself to do the assignment, even if they weren't familiar with the UNIX tools....
I think you meant to say that BASIC and PASCAL are Procedural Languages. Many people seem to assume that "functional language" means the same as "non-OO language", but it's not even close. Functional languages are languages like ML and Haskell. Many other languages have features that allow them to be used as functional languages, like LISP or JavaScript (and probably Python, although I don't know it well enough to say for sure).
It's possible to write utter s*** in any language, and Python is no exception. That the use of syntactically significant whitespace helps in any way to prevent unreadable code is possibly the silliest thing I've heard all week. Cleaning up poor indentation and spacing in any language is so trivially easy as to be laughable, and since whitespace is not significant in any other programming language that I am aware of, if you feel that they aren't using enough whitespace to be readable, you're free to add more to your hearts content. (Note that I am not criticizing Python's use of whitespace, just the claim that that alone helps make the code any more readable.)
Regarding your second point, while Python is more compact than, say C# or Java, it's not really any different in that respect than Ruby, Perl, PHP, JavaScript, or any number of other interpreted languages. And yet some of those languages (like Ruby) have a great reputation for producing readable code, while others (Perl, PHP) have awful reputations. But it's still possible to write readable code in any of those languages, and equally possible to write unreadable code in Python.
It depends where you live. In most American houses built since at least the late 70's or so, you'll typically find at least one switched outlet in each room, because when building houses went from being a one at a time custom thing to a neighborhood at a time thing, developers decided that they didn't want to have to choose light fixtures for each house, and would rather save the time and money by having the light switches control an outlet that the eventual homeowner could plug whatever kind of light they wanted into.
Of course, they aren't on every outlet, and many Americans don't consider these switched outlets to be a feature, seeing as they are primarily associated with apartments and cookie cutter homes. I know in my house we've gradually been replacing them with hardwired fixtures as we do our various home improvement projects. But I'd be very surprised if the majority of Americans aren't at least vaguely familiar with the concept of switched outlets. At the very least, pretty much anyone that lives in a large apartment complex, condo, townhouse, or single family house in a (relatively) recently developed neighborhood certainly would be.
Oh, and I think you meant to say that American milk chocolate is rubbish. There are American companies that make perfectly good dark chocolate (assuming it's real dark chocolate that they are actually willing to put a %cocoa on the label. I hardly consider anything Hershey makes to be "dark".)
Try changing antlr2.org to antlr.org in the URL. It seems that in the changeover from version 2 to version 3, a lot changed around on the website, and there are now a lot of broken links on both versions of the site. It's unfortunate, because it does reflect poorly on what otherwise seems to be a pretty good project. I've not actually used ANTLR yet myself, although I may be using it in the near future. (But thanks to the pointer to GOLD, I'll look into that as well.) The site has been very valuable to me in the past in that there used to be a PDF by the author about how to build an ANTLR style parser by hand. As the language I was using at the time was not supported y ANTLR or any other tool that I could find, that PDF was key to me being able to complete the project that I was working on. Unfortunately, I didn't think to download the PDF at the time, and it too seems to have been a casualty of the chaos that has consumed the ANTLR website of late. If that chapter is a part of this book, I think I'd be willing to drop the $25 just to have a copy of that on hand.
My wife's former employer had this down to a science. An individual's supervisor would approach them and tell them that they needed to talk to them in their office, and by the time he or she got back to their desk, they would be locked out of their computer, and their building access codes, phone extensions and everything else controlled by the IT department would all be disabled. If multiple people with different supervisors were being let go, they would coordinate to do it all at the same time so that word wouldn't have time to spread around the office.
Well, yes and no... After all, the classes are for the mothers, not the babies. The impression that I've gotten from the classes so far is that it's usually the mothers that don't know what to do, not the babies. If the mothers do their part right, the baby doesn't seem to have too much trouble with it.
Of course it's easy for me to say that now after talking to a nurse and watching a couple of videos at the hospital. Its going to be a few months yet before I can really say that from first hand experience.
"The old joke is that the best way to make a small fortune in aviation is to start with a large one,"
I though that was pretty much true of any field. I know I've heard it said that the best way to make a small fortune in the stock market is to start with a large one, and I have a hard time thinking of any area of business where that isn't the case. Hence the age-old saying "It takes money to make money." (Well, it doesn't really, but it sure helps out.)
It probably doesn't get paid. At least not all of it. The particulars vary from one place to another, but the condensed version goes something like this: All your assets get sold off by a stranger who distributes the proceeds amongst your creditors, and you get a big black eye on your financial history that takes a long time to go away.
The risk there is that you are reinventing the wheel with JavaScript DOM code and other plumbing that have been done thousands of times before by countless other developers and, lets face it, probably done better.
Probably, but not necessarily:) But when it comes down to it, if you plan to do anything non-trivial in a browser, you have to use JavaScript one way or another, whether that means writing it yourself, using pre-written libraries, or using server generated code. For people who don't have a strong background in JavaScript, the third option may be attractive, but from what I've seen of Microsoft's attempts so far I'd rather not use their JavaScript code or have them generating it for me. I do tend to reuse existing JavaScript libraries whenever appropriate (but I've been working in the language long enough that I can do a pretty good job of writing my own when I have to) so hopefully I am not reinventing the wheel too often... I did recently find.NET to work really well for heavily script driven sites - the team I was working on created C# web services for all of the remote data operations, and a simple XmlHttpRequest SOAP gateway. Then the backend guys wrote all of the web services while the JavaScript gurus worked their magic on the front end.
Perhaps you are one of the ellusive jedi masters of C and C++, but I think it is fair to say that C or C++ are really innapropriate choices for the majority of web developers these days.
I certainly wouldn't claim master status there, but the work that I do in C only barely qualifies as Web Development in that yes data is being passed over an HTTP connection. When I say low level server architecture, I mean that I am actually writing a server. The server does a lot of audio processing, so there is a high demand on CPU time, and there is a lot of low level code to optimize filesystem and network throughput that would be hard to implement in a higher level language. I've looked into other languages in the past, as I will admit the application is rather tedious to maintain. C# would be nice, but it is currently missing some of the features that I need with respect to asynchronous IO. Java's NIO looks like it may work, but so far there hasn't been any interest at my employer about pursuing that route, and at this point the system is mature enough that I'm not sure a rewrite in another language would really be worthwhile.
Visual Studio is great if you only ever use one language. Until recently I did web development using ASP.NET, and I spent maybe a quarter of my time at most in Visual Studio (2005). I used VS anytime I was editing one of the C# web services because the IntelliSense was invaluable, but for literally everything else, I would go back to ViM. VS is tolerable for editing CSS (if you disable validation so you don't drown in fake "errors") but only barely passable for editing XML/XHTML and just plain awful when it comes to doing anything at all in JavaScript.
While being able to use C# web services on the backend was a godsend in many ways, the most frustrating changes were when I'd spend half a day tweaking JavaScript only to discover that some minor change I made was going to require me to fire up Visual Studio in order to (eventually) rebuild some server component. I mean even if you're not going to bother with the auto completion, would a little bit of context sensitive auto-indent be too much to ask? Sometimes I was surprised they even bothered with syntax highlighting in JavaScript files because they certainly didn't put any other effort into it.
While I mostly agree with you, I have to say that not everything is sunshine and roses in.NET land. Certainly, I think that the class libraries and the C# language itself are exceptionally well done, and the CLR will do wonders for the field. But coming from more of a web development background than a desktop app background, Wow did Microsoft mess up ASP.NET. After all the thought that went into the language, and the runtime, sitting down with WebForms feels about like getting stabbed in the eye. I don't have much experience with Windows Forms, but to the extent that WebForms was based off of it, I really have no interest in even trying. (It's rather outside my field anyway, so it's not that I am actively avoiding it.) For all the appreciation that I have for the.NET runtime as a whole, my impression of ASP.NET in particular was excellently summed up by Douglas Adams: "it is easy to be blinded to the essential uselessness of them by the sense of achievement you get from getting them to work at all. In other words... their fundamental design flaws are completely hidden by their superficial design flaws."
For as much as I like programming in C#, I just can't see myself using it very often, as it is just not very well suited to the kinds of work that I do most, particularly web development, where I use mostly JavaScript and whatever server side language happens to be convenient, and low level server architecture, which I mostly do in C and occasionally C++. (I have some hope for the latter at least - the biggest thing holding me back is the lack of high performance networking API's to work with in.NET. If they can add something along the lines of Java's NIO, I might be able to start doing at least some of that work in C#.)
Slashdot Mirror
Yes, the author of the FP article does have an agenda. So does Al Gore (the movie he made does make a clear statement about how he feels about the current debate). Neither one of them is doing the research themselves, they are both attempting to bring attention to research other people are doing that supports their side of the debate. I'm guessing that he wasn't the author of the "report last month, released along with a petition signed by 32,000 U. S. scientists", he is merely bringing attention to it.
FTFAs:
Well, that's odd. I must say that I am surprised to learn that the people raising the ever increasing supply of organic products at my local grocery store aren't making any money. I had no idea there were so many philanthropists in the agriculture business.
...presumed innocent. They are not necessarily interchangeable. If everyone assumed he was innocent there wouldn't be any point in looking for evidence, right?
Assume: To take for granted; accept without verification or proof; "I assume his train was late"
Presume: To take for granted as being true in the absence of proof to the contrary: "We presumed she was innocent."
I believe the GP was talking about voting out the people who passed the laws obligating the phone company to collect the data in the first place. TFA is a little short on detail, but it sounds like, far from having broken the law, the telephone company was actually complying with the law by collecting this data. There is no mention about whether laws were broken in sharing the data with the researchers who performed this particular study. However, the point remains that somebody is legally required to have this data, and whomever that "somebody" is, they have this same ability to track individual users. And now, thanks to this research, we understand the implications of that.
The problem with JavaScript has nothing to do with the language itself, the problem is that no two browser implement it quite the same way. Adding another language that's only supported in a proprietary and still not very widespread plugin isn't going to help that one bit.
Browser compatibility aside, JavaScript is actually very solid and is a great language to program in for people who actually bother to learn it (unless you are really stuck up about static typing or class based OO, in which case, sorry...) Why so many people work so hard in trying to convert Ruby or Java into JavaScript (e.g. RJS or GWT) or make JavaScript look like a language that it isn't (e.g. ASP.NET AJAX) rather than just learning the damn language I will never figure out.
This of course brings me to JavaScript's second biggest problem - it's users. Why is it that JavaScript, apparently alone among languages, can attract so many programmers that have absolutely no desire to even try to learn the language? I've heard people who programmed professionally in JavaScript for years claim that it doesn't support inheritance. In any other OO language that would be the sort of thing that a new programmer would learn in the first week. Most experienced programmers when learning a new language would sit down with a book or a quickstart guide or tutorial of some sort and learn at least the basics of the language before they tried to take on a meaningful project, but apparently with JavaScript it's OK to just jump in and learn as little as you have to as you go along.
Military grade weapons doesn't necessarily have to mean bombs. In fact there are a number of countries in the world where people are free to own "military grade weapons" (e.g. military issue assault rifles) and there are some where every adult male is required to.
He didn't sue George Bush, he subpoenaed him, as well as his brother Jeb. I forget the details exactly, but he basically subpoenaed a whole laundry list of high profile people from the "religious right" hoping to get them to take his side in some court case he was involved in. Not one of them would get involved.
It's a bad sign when your closest ideological allies won't touch you with a 10 foot pole.
The first house I lived in had about 30 apple trees on the property. I believe they were Red Delicious or something similar, but I can't remember for sure; it was well over 20 years ago now that I lived there, and I was pretty young at the time. But I do still remember how much better those were than any apple you can buy in a store. I ate apples all the time as a kid, and I still like them, but about the only ones that I am willing to buy at the grocery store are granny smith. They are about the only ones that are crisp enough for me to enjoy eating. Occasionally I'll buy Gala apples, but even those seem to be hit or miss.
I am pretty sure that almost all produce grown on a large scale for sale in American supermarkets is grown for consistency and attractiveness over any other feature. Personally, I consider that to be a more valid reason to buy organic produce than any of the concerns about chemical fertilizers. Organic produce (at least organic fruits) tend to be much more flavorful than their non-organic brethren even if they don't look nearly as attractive.
They are actually pretty good at what they do, but they are also in a bit of a cyclical industry and they apparently like to clean house when things slow down. In particular, they seem to have a tendency to let go people who have been around for a long time (and therefore have high salaries) but aren't on the track to be an associate, so that they can replace them with somebody new (and therefore cheaper) the next time things pick up. I think office politics plays a role as well, as I know several people that work there or worked there have noticed that people who don't get along well with certain project managers are disproportionately more likely to get laid off.
I figured the implementation was different than what I was describing, but my point remains that, unlike the GGP, most Americans shouldn't be that utterly confused by the concept of turning off an outlet.
I hadn't the slightest idea what a UK power outlet looked like until just now, but I've been seeing / hearing people use the phrase "switching things off at the outlet" or similar for probably two years now, and I don't think I was ever once confused as to what they meant when they said it. So saying that Americans "don't have the slightest notion of this concept" seems a bit much to me.
Plus, if you want to make sure the students aren't using Excel in your own classes, just give them a problem that has more than 32768 data points (although I heard this may not work anymore with 2007?) I had a professor who did this once. About half of the class never turned it in because "It would crash Excel" or "Excel won't handle that many rows" or something similar. Of course, the professor never told us how we were expected to complete the assignment; all you had to do was log into any UNIX (the computers in the lab for that class were all IRIX, so this was not really a stretch) and run "sort datafile | uniq -c". From there, you could either use one of a number of *NIX based graphing tools, if you familiar with them, or copy the new smaller dataset into Excel to draw the actual chart. But many people in the class just assumed that because they were asked to draw a chart, they were supposed to use Excel, and when that didn't work, they were lost.
Mind you, this was in a 400 level CS course, so anyone in the class should have been able to write a program themself to do the assignment, even if they weren't familiar with the UNIX tools....
I think you meant to say that BASIC and PASCAL are Procedural Languages. Many people seem to assume that "functional language" means the same as "non-OO language", but it's not even close. Functional languages are languages like ML and Haskell. Many other languages have features that allow them to be used as functional languages, like LISP or JavaScript (and probably Python, although I don't know it well enough to say for sure).
It's possible to write utter s*** in any language, and Python is no exception. That the use of syntactically significant whitespace helps in any way to prevent unreadable code is possibly the silliest thing I've heard all week. Cleaning up poor indentation and spacing in any language is so trivially easy as to be laughable, and since whitespace is not significant in any other programming language that I am aware of, if you feel that they aren't using enough whitespace to be readable, you're free to add more to your hearts content. (Note that I am not criticizing Python's use of whitespace, just the claim that that alone helps make the code any more readable.)
Regarding your second point, while Python is more compact than, say C# or Java, it's not really any different in that respect than Ruby, Perl, PHP, JavaScript, or any number of other interpreted languages. And yet some of those languages (like Ruby) have a great reputation for producing readable code, while others (Perl, PHP) have awful reputations. But it's still possible to write readable code in any of those languages, and equally possible to write unreadable code in Python.
I prefer Electric Sheep.
It depends where you live. In most American houses built since at least the late 70's or so, you'll typically find at least one switched outlet in each room, because when building houses went from being a one at a time custom thing to a neighborhood at a time thing, developers decided that they didn't want to have to choose light fixtures for each house, and would rather save the time and money by having the light switches control an outlet that the eventual homeowner could plug whatever kind of light they wanted into.
Of course, they aren't on every outlet, and many Americans don't consider these switched outlets to be a feature, seeing as they are primarily associated with apartments and cookie cutter homes. I know in my house we've gradually been replacing them with hardwired fixtures as we do our various home improvement projects. But I'd be very surprised if the majority of Americans aren't at least vaguely familiar with the concept of switched outlets. At the very least, pretty much anyone that lives in a large apartment complex, condo, townhouse, or single family house in a (relatively) recently developed neighborhood certainly would be.
Oh, and I think you meant to say that American milk chocolate is rubbish. There are American companies that make perfectly good dark chocolate (assuming it's real dark chocolate that they are actually willing to put a %cocoa on the label. I hardly consider anything Hershey makes to be "dark".)
Try changing antlr2.org to antlr.org in the URL. It seems that in the changeover from version 2 to version 3, a lot changed around on the website, and there are now a lot of broken links on both versions of the site. It's unfortunate, because it does reflect poorly on what otherwise seems to be a pretty good project. I've not actually used ANTLR yet myself, although I may be using it in the near future. (But thanks to the pointer to GOLD, I'll look into that as well.) The site has been very valuable to me in the past in that there used to be a PDF by the author about how to build an ANTLR style parser by hand. As the language I was using at the time was not supported y ANTLR or any other tool that I could find, that PDF was key to me being able to complete the project that I was working on. Unfortunately, I didn't think to download the PDF at the time, and it too seems to have been a casualty of the chaos that has consumed the ANTLR website of late. If that chapter is a part of this book, I think I'd be willing to drop the $25 just to have a copy of that on hand.
My wife's former employer had this down to a science. An individual's supervisor would approach them and tell them that they needed to talk to them in their office, and by the time he or she got back to their desk, they would be locked out of their computer, and their building access codes, phone extensions and everything else controlled by the IT department would all be disabled. If multiple people with different supervisors were being let go, they would coordinate to do it all at the same time so that word wouldn't have time to spread around the office.
Well, yes and no... After all, the classes are for the mothers, not the babies. The impression that I've gotten from the classes so far is that it's usually the mothers that don't know what to do, not the babies. If the mothers do their part right, the baby doesn't seem to have too much trouble with it.
Of course it's easy for me to say that now after talking to a nurse and watching a couple of videos at the hospital. Its going to be a few months yet before I can really say that from first hand experience.
I certainly hope there aren't too people here saying "Hey... that's me!"
I though that was pretty much true of any field. I know I've heard it said that the best way to make a small fortune in the stock market is to start with a large one, and I have a hard time thinking of any area of business where that isn't the case. Hence the age-old saying "It takes money to make money." (Well, it doesn't really, but it sure helps out.)
One word.
It probably doesn't get paid. At least not all of it. The particulars vary from one place to another, but the condensed version goes something like this: All your assets get sold off by a stranger who distributes the proceeds amongst your creditors, and you get a big black eye on your financial history that takes a long time to go away.
Probably, but not necessarily
I certainly wouldn't claim master status there, but the work that I do in C only barely qualifies as Web Development in that yes data is being passed over an HTTP connection. When I say low level server architecture, I mean that I am actually writing a server. The server does a lot of audio processing, so there is a high demand on CPU time, and there is a lot of low level code to optimize filesystem and network throughput that would be hard to implement in a higher level language. I've looked into other languages in the past, as I will admit the application is rather tedious to maintain. C# would be nice, but it is currently missing some of the features that I need with respect to asynchronous IO. Java's NIO looks like it may work, but so far there hasn't been any interest at my employer about pursuing that route, and at this point the system is mature enough that I'm not sure a rewrite in another language would really be worthwhile.
Visual Studio is great if you only ever use one language. Until recently I did web development using ASP.NET, and I spent maybe a quarter of my time at most in Visual Studio (2005). I used VS anytime I was editing one of the C# web services because the IntelliSense was invaluable, but for literally everything else, I would go back to ViM. VS is tolerable for editing CSS (if you disable validation so you don't drown in fake "errors") but only barely passable for editing XML/XHTML and just plain awful when it comes to doing anything at all in JavaScript.
While being able to use C# web services on the backend was a godsend in many ways, the most frustrating changes were when I'd spend half a day tweaking JavaScript only to discover that some minor change I made was going to require me to fire up Visual Studio in order to (eventually) rebuild some server component. I mean even if you're not going to bother with the auto completion, would a little bit of context sensitive auto-indent be too much to ask? Sometimes I was surprised they even bothered with syntax highlighting in JavaScript files because they certainly didn't put any other effort into it.
While I mostly agree with you, I have to say that not everything is sunshine and roses in .NET land. Certainly, I think that the class libraries and the C# language itself are exceptionally well done, and the CLR will do wonders for the field. But coming from more of a web development background than a desktop app background, Wow did Microsoft mess up ASP.NET. After all the thought that went into the language, and the runtime, sitting down with WebForms feels about like getting stabbed in the eye. I don't have much experience with Windows Forms, but to the extent that WebForms was based off of it, I really have no interest in even trying. (It's rather outside my field anyway, so it's not that I am actively avoiding it.) For all the appreciation that I have for the .NET runtime as a whole, my impression of ASP.NET in particular was excellently summed up by Douglas Adams: "it is easy to be blinded to the essential uselessness of them by the sense of achievement you get from getting them to work at all. In other words... their fundamental design flaws are completely hidden by their superficial design flaws."
.NET. If they can add something along the lines of Java's NIO, I might be able to start doing at least some of that work in C#.)
For as much as I like programming in C#, I just can't see myself using it very often, as it is just not very well suited to the kinds of work that I do most, particularly web development, where I use mostly JavaScript and whatever server side language happens to be convenient, and low level server architecture, which I mostly do in C and occasionally C++. (I have some hope for the latter at least - the biggest thing holding me back is the lack of high performance networking API's to work with in