I'm sorry if I came off that way. I'm really just financially paranoid. When I say I live in a hovel, I mean it. While most of my colleagues have $300k+ houses, I bought a $50k house, 500sq feet. I drive a 14 year old car. I live *really* cheap, because I'm financially paranoid. I've seen enough of the "I've been laid off for 3 years" stories that I want to be prepared for such a situation. I guess my comment about saving money was meant to be my contribution to the thread, and I'm sorry if it came off as bragging. I'm just wondering if there's an alternative to self imposed deprivation.
Now that I'm self employed, I don't make any more than I did before. In fact, when you take the "self-employment tax" into account, I make less. I've traded my security in exchange for ownership in what I do. Now that my security is gone, I'm interested in what other people are doing to safeguard themselves. I'm hoping I (and others) can learn something from this thread to increase quality of living without sacrificing security.
So, if you're through with cheap jabs that are an attempt to be modded up for humor, please contribute something constructive.
(preemptive warning, I'm not a console gamer)
So the console itself is more expensive, and maybe even the games are (guessing here). I'm a cheap bastard, as evidenced by the fact that I live off less than 1/3rd of what I make, banking the rest for an early retirement. This doesn't stop me from spending a shitload of money on things I really care about. (Example being that I own individual pieces of dive gear that cost more than my car did.)
If you're going to spend a lot of time using something, a high initial cost is less important. All of the arguments I've seen in this thread regarding expensive food are nonsequiturs. A better analogy is a bed. You spend between 6 and 8 hours a day in one, and you own the same one for at least a year or two (I would hope). When you amortize the cost of a bed, the daily cost becomes negligible. Would you knowingly settle for 2 years of sub-par sleep just to save 50 cents a day? Some people do, and I just don't get it.
If you plan on using a gaming console on a regular basis, the initial cost should be less important than the enjoyment you get from using it (within reason). If you plan on using it infrequently, then cost should be more important. It's as simple as that.
If you are doing it at your employer's behest, and on company time, then they are the ones liable. This is a gross generalization, but for the most part true. Think of it this way: If you are an employee of XYZ Inc. and you are working on a software project for a customer, and you hose it up. Would you be sued directly? No. The company would be sued. You were acting as an agent of the company.
If someone brings their computer in, and you lose all of their Quicken (tm) data, then you did it while acting as an agent of the company. The company is liable, you aren't. (Again, gray area.)
I wouldn't be worried about it, but IANAL. Hopefully some of the other posts will give better insight as to this.
"I bet that Red Hat will start offering a consolidated support contract that will offer support for both JBoss and Red Hat when you are running JBoss on Red Hat."
"Official Support" has been one of my biggest obstacles trying to sell OSS as a consultant. I work on whatever platform my customer dictates, but I always try to make a strong pitch for OSS. 90% of the time, the customer refuses. Why? It is *always* support.
Yes, yes, I know that you can buy support for just about any major OSS application, but I think consolidation can be the key. At least a few of my past "inflexible" customers would have accepted an OS/AppServer/DB combination if it all came in a nice supported package. (Think "Redhat/JBoss/RedHatDB")
What I took from the article was that it is more about mind-set. Software has to serve a purpose, and in the business world it has to serve a business purpose. (Wow, what a concept.) We geeks tend to look at things from a "Wow, that's cool!" perspective. I say we because I am a software developer myself.
In the business world "cool" doesn't cut it. I'm an independant consultant, and one of the things that has made my business wildly successful is my cognitive dissonance between what is cool/good and what solves the customer's problems.
Whenever I take on a new contract, I immediately begin trying to work OSS solutions in. My development platform of choice is Java on Linux, using Tomcat as the application server behind LVS. I immediately try to get the customer to understand that the money they will save on software licenses will be much more than they have to spend on additional hardware. (Tomcat is great, but it does need a bit more hardware in the enterprise environment.)
Next is where the difference lies: If the customer can't accept my OSS platform requirements, I just work around them. The "sandals-and-ponytail" mentality tends to be one of "OSS or bust", whereas I will use whatever technology the customer ends up dictating that I use. But I don't stop there.
By having advocated a (largely) OSS platform, I can then point out to customers how these tools would have saved them the headaches they encounter later in the project, had we been allowed to use them. I do this tactfully, because my end goal is an incremental integration of OSS tools.
To sum things up, my business approach is: 1) Solve the business problem, regardless of the tools. 2) Solve the problems caused by proprietary tools using OSS tools, and make sure the customer knows who/what their savior was.
One of my current contracts is 100% MS, and is rabidly ANTI-OSS. I'm making headway with them, slowly but surely, and making a bunch of money while I do it.
We all just need to think on a smaller scale. Not just "change one customer at a time," but instead "change one tool for a customer at a time." It is a war of attrition, and in the end we will win.
p.s. I have had the rare customer who says "I don't care what you use, just build BLAHBLAHBLAH." They're my favorites, and get a preferential billing rate.
"Although... Can you imagine what kind of cash would be needed to buy out all the lucrative.com sex site domains at "fair market value"? And of course, how to go about deciding which domain is worth more, sex.com or 12345wewerelategettingoursexpicsdomain.net (and how much extra money that would cost)."
This was exactly my point. They (the registrars) could give you a.XXX domain in EXCHANGE for your existing.COM, but as we've seen in the past,.COM addresses are considered valuable. This means that if they wanted to make it mandatory, which I think is the only way it would work, it would be hugely expensive.
"You didn't really check then did you because this is false."
Ok Mr. Lawyer, explain this to me: Why can people buy and sell them if they aren't property? And pardon my argumentative tone, but you could have taken a more pleasant one with me as well.
"It IS voluntary. If people get used to.xxx names they'll get used to them and stuff will have a greater incentive to move out of.com."
If they created a.MONKEYS TLD, the existing sites about monkeys wouldn't MOVE to.MONKEYS, they would simply register a.MONKEYS domain in addition to the one they have. You can have an arbitrary number of domains pointed to the same site, in case you didn't realize that. The whole "move" argument is inconsequential.
So you have to look at what the motives are. I'm fine with creating new TLDs, no problem there. But if they think they are going to MOVE the existing pr0n sites into.XXX because they create it, that just isn't going to happen.
The point I was trying to make is that this would only meet the expectations of the people proposing it if it were mandatory, and that opens a whole new can of worms.
Good idea/bad idea issues aside, if this were made mandatory what would the enforcement cost be, and who would pay it?
Last time I checked, domain names were treated like property. Suppose I own hotsweatymonkeysex.com (which I don't, unfortunately). Could they force me to give up my domain name without compensation (other than a free.XXX domain)? If not, then would they strictly be dictating what kind of content I could put on my site?
The former is reminiscent of "imminent domain" (pun intended), and the latter is a violation of my freedom of speech. The only remaining option I could see would be for them to buy me out, but who would foot the bill?
Given the logistics of it, I could only see this working on a voluntary basis, which is to say that it wouldn't.
If you look at most of the games that are addictive to adults, they involve some form of collaboration between players. From MMORPGs (like Evercrack) to Battlefield2, it is a chance for adults to play a game while interacting with other people. Outside of work.
For many adults, online gaming is becoming a replacement for going out to the bar with friends after work. Instead you go home, and spent time with your friends killing other people.
As to the age issue, I can say that in Battlefield2 (of which I am a heavily addicted player), in 1-on-1 combat a 12 year old may win, but older folks TEND TO have the discipline to form squads and execute team play on a much grander scale. I'm 28, and I'll take a squad of 30+ year olds any day over some teenagers.
This may be a generalization, but I find it to hold true most of the time. And what adult doesn't love spanking little kids online every once in a while? Their hubris nearly demands it!:)
Look, nobody is using notepad/vi and javac these days to develop anything. And most of the Java software we develop these days doesn't simply run from the command line. Be it a J2EE application or an Eclipse RCP application, most *free* (as in speech or beer) tools don't do the greatest job when dealing with a predefined configuration, such as the aforementioned.
Please, someone prove me wrong on this, but I can't seem to find a decent code profiler for use with J2EE or Eclipse RCP applications. You can't simply launch them in a JVM and have your way with them.
I have used some plugins for Eclipse that almost do an OK job of this, but even they are limited. The best I've found to-date is:
Even this one has major warts, though. Such as it only runs reasonably on Windows, while I do most of my Java development on a Mac these days.
I'm sure someone will come along and suggest JProbe, or another commercial product. If the price were right, I'd by any of these as well. Unfortunately, for the moment, it is more cost effective to pepper my code with Log4J statements providing profiling information in the form of a log file and to parse the results myself.
Again, if anyone can prove that I'm incredibly wrong, I'll buy you all the beer you can drink the next time I'm "in your neck of the woods."
Granted, the number of pages indexed can be a misleading metric... but in the 20 minutes I've spent with it so far, I'm finding that a significant number of the pages I'm searching for are not in their index.
Maybe the things I'm searching for are a bit esoteric, but I think these guys are in for a serious game of catch-up since everything I searched for is readily available via Google.
You can have the best search algorithm in the world, but if your pool of data to search is smaller than the other guy, you're going to have a hard time of it. Don't get me wrong, I'd love to see another player out there pushing Google, to force them to innovate more than they have. But if these guys have been in the business since 2004, they've had plenty of time to index pages.
VB is an excellent choice for mediocre programmers who already have a basic grounding in CS. Unfortunately, VB tends to mask the basic CS skills a developer needs to acquire to grow beyond it. I've worked with several people who had great potential, but were forever stuck in a VB frame of mind.
Java and C# are nearly as easy to learn as VB, granted they are lacking a bit of the syntactic sugar. I would recommend Java over C#, simply because the class library adheres much more closely to the standard "Gang of Four" design patterns, which equates to exposure to good design principles for a new developer. Don't get me wrong,.Net has a good class library as well, but I find that it isn't as consistent in its interface definitions as Java is.
Now, the argument that will probably pop up to correct me is that VB.Net uses the.Net class library, and as such is no different from C#. Having spent the last few months cleaning up after VB.Net developers, I would argue that it would be, if they used it as such. Frankly, when a new or unskilled programmer picks up VB.Net, they immediately use Trim$(myString) versus myString.trim(). Granted, it does the same job in the end, but it is training them to avoid OO methodologies.
My next big rant would be that VB.Net will spoil a new developer on expecting everything to read immediately like plain English. Don't get me wrong, now, that's one of the nice things about VB. If Then... Gotta love that, except... If they get spoiled by this, then they are forever stagnated in VB. I have one developer I work with, every once in a while, who simply refuses to transition to any other platform just because he is locked into VB's syntax. A syntax which is unlike 90% or better of any other languages out there.
Java, C#, even PHP and Perl, share more in common in syntactic terms than VB does. Start a new developer out on a platform that will foster a better understanding of other platforms, instead of locking them in like VB tends to.
<Disclaimer>I made my living for years doing VB, but not by choice. I'm a dyed-in-the-wool C programmer, who prefers Java these days.</Disclaimer>
I was a long-time VB developer. "Was" is the key word. I worked for a major MS partner, and started working with the pre-alpha releases of.Net. After a short while I decided that VB.Net was a complete joke, and decided to switch languages (I had originally been a C/C++ junkie, so no trouble there).
I've spent the last 5 years doing Java development, and was recently called in to overhaul a VB6/VB.Net application. I agreed to do it, since rosy memories left me thinking it would be better than it actually is.
Lo and behold, VB.Net is worse than I remember it. The last 5 years of Java development have spoiled me. I wouldn't mind doing C#, but the customer requires VB. Everything I told my previous customers about VB being dead was more prescient than I ever could have believed.
At this point, I can categorize VB programmers into 2 categories:
1) Holding onto VB for dear life, writing their same VB code around the obfuscated constructs forced upon them by VB.Net.
2) Holding onto VB for dear life, but trying to adopt the.Net class library, yielding code that is almost legible, if it weren't for the stupid constructs used to bolt VB onto it.
On the other hand, MS has given VB programmers access to things they've always wished for. The problem is that the syntax is contrived and "bolted on." The downside is that the syntax is incredibly obtuse. "AddressOf"? I thought we weren't supposed to use that?! Now it's required?! (A collective response, as a C++ programmer I have no problem with function pointers.)
At this point I can say that I honestly feel that anyone holding on to VB.Net has a doomed career. If you can't make the switch to C# (add curly braces and semicolons, subtract the cruft), then you need to get out of this line of work immediately. And, better yet, switch to Java, which has a superior class library, more consistant syntax, and will run on any platform.
At this point I'm waiting for my VB.Net contract to end, and have already informed the companies I subcontract through that I will not take any more MS related contracts. On the mornings that I have to work in VB.Anything I wake up with a knot in my stomach dreading the hoops I'll have to jump through to get my job done.
...I can honestly say you won't find any mainstream language that meets all of your criteria. Java is your best bet. The only things on that laundry list that it doesn't have are operator overloading and multiple inheritance. To be honest, since I switched to Java I haven't really missed either of those anyway.
Install the JDK, Eclipse, and CVS, and you'll be one happy camper. Everything you'll ever need will be *free*, and most of it OSS at the same time. You can't beat that.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm sorry if I came off that way. I'm really just financially paranoid. When I say I live in a hovel, I mean it. While most of my colleagues have $300k+ houses, I bought a $50k house, 500sq feet. I drive a 14 year old car. I live *really* cheap, because I'm financially paranoid. I've seen enough of the "I've been laid off for 3 years" stories that I want to be prepared for such a situation. I guess my comment about saving money was meant to be my contribution to the thread, and I'm sorry if it came off as bragging. I'm just wondering if there's an alternative to self imposed deprivation.
Now that I'm self employed, I don't make any more than I did before. In fact, when you take the "self-employment tax" into account, I make less. I've traded my security in exchange for ownership in what I do. Now that my security is gone, I'm interested in what other people are doing to safeguard themselves. I'm hoping I (and others) can learn something from this thread to increase quality of living without sacrificing security.
So, if you're through with cheap jabs that are an attempt to be modded up for humor, please contribute something constructive.
Thanks, The Waxed Yak
(preemptive warning, I'm not a console gamer) So the console itself is more expensive, and maybe even the games are (guessing here). I'm a cheap bastard, as evidenced by the fact that I live off less than 1/3rd of what I make, banking the rest for an early retirement. This doesn't stop me from spending a shitload of money on things I really care about. (Example being that I own individual pieces of dive gear that cost more than my car did.) If you're going to spend a lot of time using something, a high initial cost is less important. All of the arguments I've seen in this thread regarding expensive food are nonsequiturs. A better analogy is a bed. You spend between 6 and 8 hours a day in one, and you own the same one for at least a year or two (I would hope). When you amortize the cost of a bed, the daily cost becomes negligible. Would you knowingly settle for 2 years of sub-par sleep just to save 50 cents a day? Some people do, and I just don't get it. If you plan on using a gaming console on a regular basis, the initial cost should be less important than the enjoyment you get from using it (within reason). If you plan on using it infrequently, then cost should be more important. It's as simple as that.
...until they can buy OS X and duct-tape a Start button to it.
If you are doing it at your employer's behest, and on company time, then they are the ones liable. This is a gross generalization, but for the most part true. Think of it this way: If you are an employee of XYZ Inc. and you are working on a software project for a customer, and you hose it up. Would you be sued directly? No. The company would be sued. You were acting as an agent of the company. If someone brings their computer in, and you lose all of their Quicken (tm) data, then you did it while acting as an agent of the company. The company is liable, you aren't. (Again, gray area.) I wouldn't be worried about it, but IANAL. Hopefully some of the other posts will give better insight as to this.
At least on the paper applications, there was a margin to write in.
"Do not write in this space."
'OK'
"I bet that Red Hat will start offering a consolidated support contract that will offer support for both JBoss and Red Hat when you are running JBoss on Red Hat."
"Official Support" has been one of my biggest obstacles trying to sell OSS as a consultant. I work on whatever platform my customer dictates, but I always try to make a strong pitch for OSS. 90% of the time, the customer refuses. Why? It is *always* support.
Yes, yes, I know that you can buy support for just about any major OSS application, but I think consolidation can be the key. At least a few of my past "inflexible" customers would have accepted an OS/AppServer/DB combination if it all came in a nice supported package. (Think "Redhat/JBoss/RedHatDB")
What I took from the article was that it is more about mind-set. Software has to serve a purpose, and in the business world it has to serve a business purpose. (Wow, what a concept.) We geeks tend to look at things from a "Wow, that's cool!" perspective. I say we because I am a software developer myself.
In the business world "cool" doesn't cut it. I'm an independant consultant, and one of the things that has made my business wildly successful is my cognitive dissonance between what is cool/good and what solves the customer's problems.
Whenever I take on a new contract, I immediately begin trying to work OSS solutions in. My development platform of choice is Java on Linux, using Tomcat as the application server behind LVS. I immediately try to get the customer to understand that the money they will save on software licenses will be much more than they have to spend on additional hardware. (Tomcat is great, but it does need a bit more hardware in the enterprise environment.)
Next is where the difference lies: If the customer can't accept my OSS platform requirements, I just work around them. The "sandals-and-ponytail" mentality tends to be one of "OSS or bust", whereas I will use whatever technology the customer ends up dictating that I use. But I don't stop there.
By having advocated a (largely) OSS platform, I can then point out to customers how these tools would have saved them the headaches they encounter later in the project, had we been allowed to use them. I do this tactfully, because my end goal is an incremental integration of OSS tools.
To sum things up, my business approach is:
1) Solve the business problem, regardless of the tools.
2) Solve the problems caused by proprietary tools using OSS tools, and make sure the customer knows who/what their savior was.
One of my current contracts is 100% MS, and is rabidly ANTI-OSS. I'm making headway with them, slowly but surely, and making a bunch of money while I do it.
We all just need to think on a smaller scale. Not just "change one customer at a time," but instead "change one tool for a customer at a time." It is a war of attrition, and in the end we will win.
p.s. I have had the rare customer who says "I don't care what you use, just build BLAHBLAHBLAH." They're my favorites, and get a preferential billing rate.
"Although... Can you imagine what kind of cash would be needed to buy out all the lucrative .com sex site domains at "fair market value"? And of course, how to go about deciding which domain is worth more, sex.com or 12345wewerelategettingoursexpicsdomain.net (and how much extra money that would cost)."
.XXX domain in EXCHANGE for your existing .COM, but as we've seen in the past,.COM addresses are considered valuable. This means that if they wanted to make it mandatory, which I think is the only way it would work, it would be hugely expensive.
This was exactly my point. They (the registrars) could give you a
"You didn't really check then did you because this is false."
.xxx names they'll get used to them and stuff will have a greater incentive to move out of .com."
.MONKEYS TLD, the existing sites about monkeys wouldn't MOVE to .MONKEYS, they would simply register a .MONKEYS domain in addition to the one they have. You can have an arbitrary number of domains pointed to the same site, in case you didn't realize that. The whole "move" argument is inconsequential.
.XXX because they create it, that just isn't going to happen.
Ok Mr. Lawyer, explain this to me: Why can people buy and sell them if they aren't property? And pardon my argumentative tone, but you could have taken a more pleasant one with me as well.
"It IS voluntary. If people get used to
If they created a
So you have to look at what the motives are. I'm fine with creating new TLDs, no problem there. But if they think they are going to MOVE the existing pr0n sites into
The point I was trying to make is that this would only meet the expectations of the people proposing it if it were mandatory, and that opens a whole new can of worms.
Good idea/bad idea issues aside, if this were made mandatory what would the enforcement cost be, and who would pay it?
.XXX domain)? If not, then would they strictly be dictating what kind of content I could put on my site?
Last time I checked, domain names were treated like property. Suppose I own hotsweatymonkeysex.com (which I don't, unfortunately). Could they force me to give up my domain name without compensation (other than a free
The former is reminiscent of "imminent domain" (pun intended), and the latter is a violation of my freedom of speech. The only remaining option I could see would be for them to buy me out, but who would foot the bill?
Given the logistics of it, I could only see this working on a voluntary basis, which is to say that it wouldn't.
If you look at most of the games that are addictive to adults, they involve some form of collaboration between players. From MMORPGs (like Evercrack) to Battlefield2, it is a chance for adults to play a game while interacting with other people. Outside of work.
:)
For many adults, online gaming is becoming a replacement for going out to the bar with friends after work. Instead you go home, and spent time with your friends killing other people.
As to the age issue, I can say that in Battlefield2 (of which I am a heavily addicted player), in 1-on-1 combat a 12 year old may win, but older folks TEND TO have the discipline to form squads and execute team play on a much grander scale. I'm 28, and I'll take a squad of 30+ year olds any day over some teenagers.
This may be a generalization, but I find it to hold true most of the time. And what adult doesn't love spanking little kids online every once in a while? Their hubris nearly demands it!
Look, nobody is using notepad/vi and javac these days to develop anything. And most of the Java software we develop these days doesn't simply run from the command line. Be it a J2EE application or an Eclipse RCP application, most *free* (as in speech or beer) tools don't do the greatest job when dealing with a predefined configuration, such as the aforementioned.
Please, someone prove me wrong on this, but I can't seem to find a decent code profiler for use with J2EE or Eclipse RCP applications. You can't simply launch them in a JVM and have your way with them.
I have used some plugins for Eclipse that almost do an OK job of this, but even they are limited. The best I've found to-date is:
http://sourceforge.net/projects/eclipsecolorer
Even this one has major warts, though. Such as it only runs reasonably on Windows, while I do most of my Java development on a Mac these days.
I'm sure someone will come along and suggest JProbe, or another commercial product. If the price were right, I'd by any of these as well. Unfortunately, for the moment, it is more cost effective to pepper my code with Log4J statements providing profiling information in the form of a log file and to parse the results myself.
Again, if anyone can prove that I'm incredibly wrong, I'll buy you all the beer you can drink the next time I'm "in your neck of the woods."
You beat me to it. That thing is outright dainty compared to my VR3 dive computers.
Granted, the number of pages indexed can be a misleading metric... but in the 20 minutes I've spent with it so far, I'm finding that a significant number of the pages I'm searching for are not in their index.
Maybe the things I'm searching for are a bit esoteric, but I think these guys are in for a serious game of catch-up since everything I searched for is readily available via Google.
You can have the best search algorithm in the world, but if your pool of data to search is smaller than the other guy, you're going to have a hard time of it. Don't get me wrong, I'd love to see another player out there pushing Google, to force them to innovate more than they have. But if these guys have been in the business since 2004, they've had plenty of time to index pages.
Does this mean I can finally have my Ribwich again?
VB is an excellent choice for mediocre programmers who already have a basic grounding in CS. Unfortunately, VB tends to mask the basic CS skills a developer needs to acquire to grow beyond it. I've worked with several people who had great potential, but were forever stuck in a VB frame of mind. Java and C# are nearly as easy to learn as VB, granted they are lacking a bit of the syntactic sugar. I would recommend Java over C#, simply because the class library adheres much more closely to the standard "Gang of Four" design patterns, which equates to exposure to good design principles for a new developer. Don't get me wrong, .Net has a good class library as well, but I find that it isn't as consistent in its interface definitions as Java is.
.Net class library, and as such is no different from C#. Having spent the last few months cleaning up after VB.Net developers, I would argue that it would be, if they used it as such. Frankly, when a new or unskilled programmer picks up VB.Net, they immediately use Trim$(myString) versus myString.trim(). Granted, it does the same job in the end, but it is training them to avoid OO methodologies.
Now, the argument that will probably pop up to correct me is that VB.Net uses the
My next big rant would be that VB.Net will spoil a new developer on expecting everything to read immediately like plain English. Don't get me wrong, now, that's one of the nice things about VB. If Then... Gotta love that, except... If they get spoiled by this, then they are forever stagnated in VB. I have one developer I work with, every once in a while, who simply refuses to transition to any other platform just because he is locked into VB's syntax. A syntax which is unlike 90% or better of any other languages out there.
Java, C#, even PHP and Perl, share more in common in syntactic terms than VB does. Start a new developer out on a platform that will foster a better understanding of other platforms, instead of locking them in like VB tends to.
<Disclaimer>I made my living for years doing VB, but not by choice. I'm a dyed-in-the-wool C programmer, who prefers Java these days.</Disclaimer>
I was a long-time VB developer. "Was" is the key word. I worked for a major MS partner, and started working with the pre-alpha releases of .Net. After a short while I decided that VB.Net was a complete joke, and decided to switch languages (I had originally been a C/C++ junkie, so no trouble there).
.Net class library, yielding code that is almost legible, if it weren't for the stupid constructs used to bolt VB onto it.
I've spent the last 5 years doing Java development, and was recently called in to overhaul a VB6/VB.Net application. I agreed to do it, since rosy memories left me thinking it would be better than it actually is.
Lo and behold, VB.Net is worse than I remember it. The last 5 years of Java development have spoiled me. I wouldn't mind doing C#, but the customer requires VB. Everything I told my previous customers about VB being dead was more prescient than I ever could have believed.
At this point, I can categorize VB programmers into 2 categories:
1) Holding onto VB for dear life, writing their same VB code around the obfuscated constructs forced upon them by VB.Net.
2) Holding onto VB for dear life, but trying to adopt the
On the other hand, MS has given VB programmers access to things they've always wished for. The problem is that the syntax is contrived and "bolted on." The downside is that the syntax is incredibly obtuse. "AddressOf"? I thought we weren't supposed to use that?! Now it's required?! (A collective response, as a C++ programmer I have no problem with function pointers.)
At this point I can say that I honestly feel that anyone holding on to VB.Net has a doomed career. If you can't make the switch to C# (add curly braces and semicolons, subtract the cruft), then you need to get out of this line of work immediately. And, better yet, switch to Java, which has a superior class library, more consistant syntax, and will run on any platform.
At this point I'm waiting for my VB.Net contract to end, and have already informed the companies I subcontract through that I will not take any more MS related contracts. On the mornings that I have to work in VB.Anything I wake up with a knot in my stomach dreading the hoops I'll have to jump through to get my job done.
Long live Java/Eclipse,
The Waxed Yak
"Big XXX Company joined Eclipse today PRs." Damnit, and I started to get excited. No p0rn here folks, move along... sigh...
...I can honestly say you won't find any mainstream language that meets all of your criteria. Java is your best bet. The only things on that laundry list that it doesn't have are operator overloading and multiple inheritance. To be honest, since I switched to Java I haven't really missed either of those anyway. Install the JDK, Eclipse, and CVS, and you'll be one happy camper. Everything you'll ever need will be *free*, and most of it OSS at the same time. You can't beat that.