wwarnick wrote:--==<snip>==--
Thanks for replying to something that obviously didn't apply to you. Or did you miss this line:
xander wrote:If you are any good, you can write your algorithms and make them work in any language.
or this line:
xander wrote:Unless you are the only intended end user, then you should pay some heed to how well the program will run, how portable it is, how is uses (abuses) system resources, &c.
I was not talking about students, and I was not talking about code that is intended to be used in house. If you are learning, or no one else is ever going to need to use your code, then the requirements of a normal end user don't matter at all. On the other hand, if you are trying to develop software that lots of people are going to use, then the requirements of the end users do matter. In that case, the ease of development should be secondary to the needs of the end user.
This does not mean that C# and .NET are inherently bad for all purposes. If your end users are all going to be Windows users, and you know they are all going to have .NET, and you know that they are not worried about performance, then sure, .NET makes sense. If you are trying to build games, where every ounce of a computers ability will be stressed, and you might want to port it to another system (Mac, Linux, older version of Windows, newer version of Windows, &c.), then your comfort should be secondary.
Also, I stand by my statement -- if you are any good, you should be able to write code equally well in any language. As a student, you are not expected to be good, so I don't know why you take offense at that. If you are a student, you are, by definition, learning. If you are learning, you are not expected to be good. Once you have a good knowledge of how to build algorithms, it shouldn't matter what language you are building them in, they are all fundamentally the same.
And, to clarify a bit, I am sure that there are good reasons to use .NET for many kinds of applications. The only reason that I have seen, so far, is that it is easier to code in. That's just lame, if you are talking about commercial grade software.
As to trying to be a developer, I have been playing with computers since the early 80s. I got to be fairly good with BASIC and Pascal as a child, but didn't feel the need to pursue software development as a full time job. I know enough about algorithms to be dangerous, and am perfectly able to implement what I know equally well in BASIC, Pascal, Python, PHP, C (not C++, never bothered with it), and HP UserRPL and SysRPL. All computer languages are basically the same, it is just a matter of placing the semi-colons in the right place, figuring out oddities with branching and looping structures, and figuring out the idiosyncrasies of the language that you are working in.
I should also note that, on these boards, it has been often suggested that before you develop something, you prototype it in a language other than the target language. This implies that a good developer is equally comfortable in at least two languages.
xander