Java or C#?

On July 04 2011 08:01 AntiLegend wrote:
both c# and java are not what you would call a scripting language.

if you really meant scripting language, then check out Perl, Python or Ruby. if you meant something else and still want to choose between C# and Java, I'd go for C#, since Visual Studio > Eclipse

On July 04 2011 08:26 StRyKeR wrote:
Do neither and go with Python.

I'm familiar with both Java and Python. For any kind of solo / small-scale project or any type of quick prototyping, I'd pick Python. Java just makes you do too much housekeeping, building up the scaffolding only to take it down again when you change your mind.

Python is much slower though, so if speed is an issue, stick to the compiled languages (although there are modules in Python that bring scripts up to C speed).

On July 04 2011 08:01 AntiLegend wrote:
both c# and java are not what you would call a scripting language.

if you really meant scripting language, then check out Perl, Python or Ruby. if you meant something else and still want to choose between C# and Java, I'd go for C#, since Visual Studio > Eclipse

On July 04 2011 09:54 joban wrote:
Go with this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LOLCODE

On July 04 2011 09:54 joban wrote:
Go with this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LOLCODE

On July 04 2011 09:54 joban wrote:
Go with this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LOLCODE

On July 04 2011 09:01 xarthaz wrote:
java is pretty bad for writing client programs for windows - no win32 support is bad. so yeah, C# is the way to go, hands down.

On July 04 2011 12:04 vek wrote:


True but client side programs (in a commercial sense) are pretty much dead. Almost everything is web these days.The last 4-5 clients I've worked with all use Java as the base of their web applications/servers.

Also java supports 32 and 64 bit just fine.. not really sure what you are on about.

I think C# is a cool language but everything it can do Java can do better. Java has more open source 3rd party libraries to choose from and much better online resources. It's also cross platform which gives a huge amount of flexibility.

Client changes their mind on the operating system they are going to use for their servers? No problem. With C# you are screwed.

The only time I use C# is when I'm bored and want to mess around with XNA on my Xbox in my spare time. I never use it for work.

On July 04 2011 12:09 InvalidID wrote:
+ Show Spoiler +
C# does a decent job for web apps. It does not have the base built up that Java does yet, but many commercial deployments use it. A big advantage of it is that it integrates really nicely into MS-SQL, which in turn integrates well into Windows Domain Services, and IIS which is what most large non web sphere companies are using, especially for intranet. As far as big software sphere companies that are on .net: Blizzard strikes out as the first example to come to mind, all their web pages have the aspx extension.

On July 04 2011 12:11 Marou wrote:
That's a hard choice, but in the end if you are looking into getting in OO, what you will learn in a language will stay valid in the other. It's more about what language feets better to your needs, depending on what you are aiming to develop but since you can do pretty much the same things with c# and java...



I am a webdeveloper and using C# is a treat

On July 04 2011 12:11 Marou wrote:
That's a hard choice, but in the end if you are looking into getting in OO, what you will learn in a language will stay valid in the other. It's more about what language feets better to your needs, depending on what you are aiming to develop but since you can do pretty much the same things with c# and java...



I am a webdeveloper and using C# is a treat

On July 04 2011 12:23 saltywet wrote:


how do u use C to develop a web? just out of curiosity that i learned C as a university course but never did anything very useful with it outside of running simple calculation tasks

On July 04 2011 11:48 InvalidID wrote:
Neither C# nor Java are scripting languages, but they both can be used in a similar fashion: making quick, dirty programs. There is absolutely no need for pointers in modern high level, managed, languages: delegates serve the role of function pointers, and references do otherwise. This is a good thing, in the sort of cases where these languages are used, development time is more expensive then processor time, and you don't have to worry about memory management, the run-time does it all for you. This makes it very easy to write stable code.

Once you are used to using these high level languages, it will seem almost painful and silly to use C++. In terms of performance, you do get some advantage out of well written C++, but in the vast majority of cases the performance difference is not a huge concern(the difference is not orders of magnitude in most cases). http://reverseblade.blogspot.com/2009/02/c-versus-c-versus-java-performance.html Shows the benchmarks. Basically over a broad variety of performance benchmarks, on Windows, C++ was about 15% faster then C#, and C# was about 15% faster then Java.

The biggest advantage of C# versus Java is Visual Studio. It is by far the best IDE out there. It is just incredibly simple to make a quick program or web-app with a simple GUI. The auto-complete feature is incredible: it fills in the blanks as you navigate through class libraries, with a contextual help menu, eliminating the need to memorize a ton of apis.

The forms editor structures a template for a GUI app for you, and automatically does all the setup. You can't use this for all applications, but for a lot of simple script-type applications, where you want just simple text boxes and other standard controls, its as easy as drag and drop, then you just fill in the blanks for the various event functions it automatically sets up for you.

On July 04 2011 13:20 joban wrote:


I've never used Visual Studio; but I'm curious to hear more about its qualities as an IDE. Don't you think ide's/gui's generally slow you down comparatively to command line and vi?

I totally agree with you that higher level languages like Python are generally a much nicer way to dive into programming, but I still think some C knowledge will benefit the intellectually curious who want to know about the processes underlying programming.

On July 04 2011 13:27 obesechicken13 wrote:


Only when the ide's don't work as intended. So yes... always.

On July 04 2011 12:09 InvalidID wrote:


C# does a decent job for web apps. It does not have the base built up that Java does yet, but many commercial deployments use it. A big advantage of it is that it has libraries that integrate really nicely into MS-SQL, which in turn integrates well into Windows Domain Services, and IIS which is what most large non web sphere companies are using, especially for intranet. As far as big software sphere companies that are on .net: Blizzard strikes out as the first example to come to mind, all their web pages have the aspx extension.

On July 04 2011 14:22 vek wrote:


Yeah it does a decent job. The thing is I haven't seen very many people use it in the real world. Maybe it's just because Australian businesses are less "Microsoft washed" than in the US. A lot use linux as the OS of choice when it comes to application servers.

This is especially the case as more people move things to the Amazon cloud/similar services. Windows just isn't worth the cost or hassle any more.

That said Windows (with cygwin!) is my OS of choice for development so don't think of me as a Windows or Microsoft hater. All I'm trying to do is let people know what kind of technology real businesses use from my own personal observation.

On July 04 2011 13:49 InvalidID wrote:


You obviously work in very different areas of software development then me. The IDE form editor features are significant time savers, for simple gui apps, but you may trade some level of control(though you don't have to give it that control, you can use VS as basically VI with contextual help, and debug integration, if you so choose). You basically can use a graphical editor to design a "form" which is basically a window, or a web page depending on if you are using windows forms or ASP+. You can then graphically assign assorted events to functions, and voila, you have the shell of a UI. It takes about 5 minutes to get a basic windows app setup, far less then manually coding all the controls in, and its visual, so you don't have to twiddle around recompiling a million times to get a simple UI to look the way you want it to. Again, and most importantly, you don't have to use the forms editor if you don't think it gives you the flexibility you want for your app, you can use it just like you use VI/command line with whatever additional features you desire.

When you get into more complex apps, then maybe the forms editor loses its advantage, as you traded some level of control away to have a skeleton UI laid out for you. I have yet to see it pose significant problems, as you can over-ride pretty much anything the IDE does manually.

Contextual help is probably the killer app of VS though. Basically, it provides a popup menu of the MSDN library documentation. For example, if I could not remember the correct function to split a string, typing string. would pop up all the functions under the string class for you to select from(though you can just ignore it and type if you know what you want, its basically like the autocomplete feature of google). It automatically generates the same for any other library you have included. It is implemented very elegantly, and once you get used to it, it is a headache to use anything else, and constantly have to look things up online.

The debug features are also very well implemented, and it seems to save a lot of time. At any given break-point or error, or even run-time point, when you are running your app in debug mode, you can see the values of all variables in the memory of your app. You can do the same with the command line but it is far less elegantly implemented.

VS is probably the main reason that Microsoft is so dominant in the enterprise: it is just an enormous time saver for writing the kind of apps we need to write in the enterprise. These apps don't need super fancy UI functionality, they need stability, simple text boxes/buttons, graphical displays simple UI logic, and low development costs. I am a big supporter of open source, but I have yet to see an open source offering with comparable functionality(though Eclipse is getting better).

On July 04 2011 14:35 InvalidID wrote:


Sure, different industries use different things that are appropriate for their application . Linux and Java have their advantages, but my area of industry(defense and aerospace manufacturing) is pretty-much the polar opposite where pretty-much everything is Microsoft oriented, with very little Linux usage outside of things like SANs or embedded devices, with specific Unix variants used on a lot of the field devices we are manufacturing. I think it has to do with inertia more then anything else, it is fricking expensive to replace everything.

Of course being in the defense/aerospace industry cloud services are not an option, a computer cannot simultaneously be physically on the internet and the intranet, for obvious reasons.

On July 04 2011 14:38 joban wrote:

Thank you for this, that was actually really informative. I used to fuck with Textmate, but when I switched to terminal (yes, I use a mac. you'd be surprised at how dominant the mac platform is in silicon valley among consumer internet companies- I know I was) I've haven't looked back- so I don't even know what most IDE's can do.

On July 04 2011 15:07 Morfildur wrote:My most recent private web project uses a thin php frontend with a lot of javascript and all the heavy work is done in a C# server (did you know that .NET actually provides a complete embedded webserver? i was suprised when i found that out :p) to which the php frontend connects via TCP/IP. It allows me to use the strengths of each language to it's fullest while i'm still avoiding most of the weaknesses... but it's still a complex solution not suited for beginners who can't differentiate between scripting languages and programming languages

On July 04 2011 13:49 InvalidID wrote:


You obviously work in very different areas of software development then me. The IDE form editor features are significant time savers, for simple gui apps, but you may trade some level of control(though you don't have to give it that control, you can use VS as basically VI with contextual help, and debug integration, if you so choose). You basically can use a graphical editor to design a "form" which is basically a window, or a web page depending on if you are using windows forms or ASP+. You can then graphically assign assorted events to functions, and voila, you have the shell of a UI. It takes about 5 minutes to get a basic windows app setup, far less then manually coding all the controls in, and its visual, so you don't have to twiddle around recompiling a million times to get a simple UI to look the way you want it to. Again, and most importantly, you don't have to use the forms editor if you don't think it gives you the flexibility you want for your app, you can use it just like you use VI/command line with whatever additional features you desire.

When you get into more complex apps, then maybe the forms editor loses its advantage, as you traded some level of control away to have a skeleton UI laid out for you. I have yet to see it pose significant problems, as you can over-ride pretty much anything the IDE does manually.

Contextual help is probably the killer app of VS though. Basically, it provides a popup menu of the MSDN library documentation. For example, if I could not remember the correct function to split a string, typing string. would pop up all the functions under the string class for you to select from(though you can just ignore it and type if you know what you want, its basically like the autocomplete feature of google). It automatically generates the same for any other library you have included. It is implemented very elegantly, and once you get used to it, it is a headache to use anything else, and constantly have to look things up online.

The debug features are also very well implemented, and it seems to save a lot of time. At any given break-point or error, or even run-time point, when you are running your app in debug mode, you can see the values of all variables in the memory of your app. You can do the same with the command line but it is far less elegantly implemented.

VS is probably the main reason that Microsoft is so dominant in the enterprise: it is just an enormous time saver for writing the kind of apps we need to write in the enterprise. These apps don't need super fancy UI functionality, they need stability, simple text boxes/buttons, graphical displays simple UI logic, and low development costs. I am a big supporter of open source, but I have yet to see an open source offering with comparable functionality(though Eclipse is getting better).

On July 04 2011 15:07 Morfildur wrote:

I do 99% of my programming work with vim, but i'm really happy when there is some C# development to do for which i can use VS. I've tried a lot of free IDEs, Eclipse, Netbeans, kdevelop, ... but none of those even gets close to what VS has to offer. It was a big factor in my decision to use C# for most of my private projects.

About Java and C#, the only reasons why someone should choose java would be either required portability (though mono does quite a good job for C# except for ASP.NET) or an existing java environment.
Java just has a lot of design decisions that don't make a lot of sense (to me) and it fell behind in features, so compared to C# it's just clumsy to code in Java, though i have to admit that it could have changed in the two years that i didn't touch java anymore.

In terms of web development i only did some asp.net stuff, which was ok but not really what i prefer. ASP.NET is ok, it can do quite a lot, but it adds a billion layers which often make it a hell to use. If you are going heavy into web development i suggest either going the PHP route or trying Java (though i have no experience with java web development).

My most recent private web project uses a thin php frontend with a lot of javascript and all the heavy work is done in a C# server (did you know that .NET actually provides a complete embedded webserver? i was suprised when i found that out :p) to which the php frontend connects via TCP/IP. It allows me to use the strengths of each language to it's fullest while i'm still avoiding most of the weaknesses... but it's still a complex solution not suited for beginners who can't differentiate between scripting languages and programming languages

On July 04 2011 21:50 Morfildur wrote:


Thats still the IDE, not the language (or rather framework).

.NET has a full WebServer integrated (it even works with mono). Writing your own Web Server is as simple as writing

HttpListener listener = new HttpListener();
listener.Prefixes.Add("http://localhost:1861/");
listener.Start();
listener.BeginGetContext(request_callback, listener);

It makes some tasks very trivial, in my example i use it in the server to recieve REST-like messages. The whole networking part is in the above 4 lines. For that project I was originally writing standard TCP/IP networking code which spanned quite a few lines and i was very happy when i found out that it's actually that easy (eventhough HTTP is of course slower than just TCP). In the PHP frontend i just use CURL to send and retrieve data, so i don't even need to bother with networking code there.

Anyways, you are definatly right about PHP IDEs, i'd gladly use one (though most of the development is done via SSH on the dev server) if they wouldn't be so horrible. In part it's actually PHPs fault though, or rather a problem in languages with no strict types. If a single variable can have 10 different types in just as many lines it's hard for the IDE to understand which type the variable has at any given point in the code and provide the correct code completion.

Example:

$foo = new TypeA();
if ($something)
{
  $foo = new TypeB();
}
elseif ($something_else)
{
  $foo = 3;
}
$foo->.... what is $foo now?

IDEs in PHP mainly work as shortcut for the manual by providing the prototype for the PHP functions... which you usually can remember anyways after using them a few times.