[ale] Hello World - in C# - in Mono - in Ubuntu is done

[Ron Frazier]

(I've used this to reply to several messages.  To all - I guess a started a 
bit of a firestorm with this thread.  I can see that everyone is very 
passionate about programming languages.  To paraphrase a cliche, put 50 
engineers in a room, ask a question, and you'll get 150 answers.  I 
certainly didn't mean to offend anyone with anything said.  Thanks for all 
the information that you've shared.  It's been very informative.  Thanks to 
all those who wished me well in my efforts.  Anyone else wishing to follow 
along with my and Justin's activities in learning cross platform C#, drop 
me a note at Ron Frazier <linuxdude at c3energy.com> .)

(Richard Faulkner  - from 09/17/10 - Thanks for the well wishes. - Ron)
(Steve Brown - from 09/17/10 - My comments to Brian below also relate to 
your note.  Thanks for the post. - Ron)
(Michael B. Trausch - from 09/16/10 - Your comments were very helpful in 
learning about the attributes of various languages. - Ron)

(William Fragakis - I've included a reply to your note from 09/17/10 at the 
bottom.)
(Jim Kinney - I've included a reply to your note from 09/17/10 at the bottom.)

--------------------------

Brian,

You bring up some good points.  From a career point of view, I probably 
still want to go with learning C#.  My wife tells me that the GS-12 pay 
scale government job somebody mentioned in another note translates to about 
$ 80 grand / year.  Now, right now, even with past programming experience, 
I'm not qualified.  But, in the future, I'd be quite happy to make that 
kind of money.

The Free Software Foundation link you mentioned certainly brings up some 
serious concerns about the patent landscape for C# and using it on non 
Windows platforms.  By the way, they also linked to another site devoted to 
eliminating software patents - http://swpat.org/ which looked interesting 
in the few minutes I spent on it.  Even if I eventually get a job 
programming C#, I might have to think twice before releasing any C# 
applications on my own on non Windows platforms.  The link to the Java 
community process was interesting, although I only read it briefly.  I 
wasn't aware of it.

You may be right about it not being likely that a non Windows shop will 
hire me to program C#.  I'm OK with that.  Being able to also work with 
Linux and / or Mac would be nice, but I'm primarily interested in those 
aspects in regards to creating my own cross platform applications.  From 
the reading I've been able to do, I'm drawn to C# not only for money 
opportunities but for the features of the language.

 From what I can tell, there is no modern, medium-high performance, object 
oriented, multi-threaded, multi-core capable language in wide use that is 
not encumbered by patents.  That's very discouraging.  This Oracle 
acquisition of Sun still really bugs me.  I couldn't imagine another 
company that could have bought them which would be more antithetical to the 
ideals of Sun.  It makes me really nervous about the whole Java and Android 
landscape.

In regard to my comment about self contained free standing applications, I 
may be about to show my ignorance here, but here's what I meant.  In the 
"old" days in DOS and Windows, you could (if you designed a program this 
way) create a program in source code, compile, and link it, drop it in a 
folder as an EXE (executable), maybe add a few DLL's, and run it.  You 
could easily transport it somewhere else.  You could easily delete 
it.  Becasue the JRE has to be installed for any Java program to run, I 
don't think you can do this with Java.  I thought you could still do this 
with C#, but I'm not sure.  Now, since neither one of these is compiling to 
machine code, I don't know what's required to package and distribute a C# 
or Java application.  But, my desire would be for it to have the attributes 
I just described.

Sincerely,

Ron

At 9/16/2010 11:15 PM -0400, Brian Pitts wrote:
>On 09/16/2010 10:25 PM, Ron Frazier wrote:
>
>So I really don't want to start an argument either, but I do have a few
>thoughts.
>
> > So, I think I can certainly make money by learning C#.  I could make money
> > with Java too, but I'm more concerned about Oracle being a corporate evil
> > demon than Microsoft at this point, given their propensity to sue people
> > after acquiring Sun.  The Java community seems to be in an uproar.  Also,
> > Microsoft is under scrutiny by the US Government for potentially anti
> > competitive practices.  That past is not good, but they have to be careful
> > about further activities of that nature.
>
>I do not think you need have any more concerns about writing server or
>desktop Java applications than you need to have about C# applications.
>Probably you should have less, since there is an explicit patent grant
>to compatible Java implementations, and the primary Java implementation
>is free software. Mono implements parts of .NET that are not EMCA
>standards and is thus at risk. I am not sure how Oracle's lawsuit about
>copyright and patent infringement in Google's Dalvik VM (a lawsuit which
>I hope fails miserably) is more troubling that Microsoft's behavior.
>
>http://www.fsf.org/news/2009-07-mscp-mono
>
> > C# is documented and specified in international EMCA standards.  I'm not
> > sure whether anything similar exists for Java.
>
>I'm not incredibly familiar with it, but there is the Java Community
>Process.
>
>http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Java_Community_Process
>
> > I want my language to be cross platform.  Java is well known for
> > this.  However, through the Mono project, as well as possibly others, it
> > appears that C# is very cross platform as well.
>
>Unless Novell is hiring, I think it is unlikely that anyone will hire
>you to develop C# code that runs on anything but Windows.
>
>I suspect that most Java code will run on Windows or Linux, while most
>C# code will only run on Windows. It certainly helps that the owner of
>Java provides a (free software) implementation of it for Linux, while
>the owner of C# does not.
>
> > Finally, I want my language to be able to produce self contained free
> > standing applications.  As far as I know, this knocks out Java.
>
>I don't understand what you mean. Don't you need a JRE or a .Net runtime
>to run either Java or C# applications?
>
>--
>All the best,
>Brian Pitts

------------------------------

On 09/17/10 William Fragakis wrote:

 > Just curious - what is the income distribution for these? Your income
 > potential is not only related to the number of openings but the salary
 > level for those openings as alluded to by the COBOL comment elsewhere.

William, thanks for wishing me good luck.  I'm afraid I cannot answer your 
question.  I just did a really brief search on Monster.  Also, most job ads 
don't post wages anyway.  We might have to look elsewhere for that data.

Ron

----------------------------

On 09/17/10 Jim Kinney wrote:

 > If you're only going learn one language learn python. It meets your 
requirements as well as the 3 you discussed and it's a fully open language.

Jim, I don't know much about Python.  Intellectually and academically, I'm 
interested in a number of languages, C#, Java, Ruby, Perl, Python, PHP, 
etc.  At the moment, I have to put my career goals at the top, and look for 
wide usage, job opportunities, and language features.  I have a family 
situation which requires me to go from being between jobs to earning decent 
money within 1 year.  I've been doing troubleshooting, maintenance, and 
install work all my professional life, with the exception of a few years of 
programming.  I really want to move into something which uses my 
creativity.  Hence the emphasis on programming.

Since Ruby, Perl, Python, and PHP are all interpreted, to my knowledge, I'd 
think their performance would be less than C# and Java.  Please don't flame 
me if that's wrong.  Other than that, Ruby looked enticing enough that I 
bought a book on it.

Ron

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Ron Frazier

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