On Sat, Dec 6, 2008 at 12:48 PM, Marco van de Voort <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > First, on what primary grounds do you select the language? Commercial (iow > something to put on your resume) or technical skills?
It's something I would like to put on my resume and that makes me employable in other areas. Make no mistake, my current job using Free Pascal is rock solid. Delphi / Object Pascal developers are scarce in this country, and I am the sole developer at the moment, plus I worked for this company before some years back. So our relationship is very good and trusting. So my choice for learning another language is not out of fear of loosing my job, it's simply my enjoyment of programming and wanting to learn new skills. I have used Object Pascal and Delphi for the last 10 years and thoroughly enjoyed it - and will continue using in for the foreseeable future. I've just rewritten our flagship product using Free Pascal and we have a lot more (smaller) projects in the pipeline. > But first, decide if you want to target larger or smaller companies. > Smaller companies are less rigid in their language ways. I'm not a big fan of large companies. Where I work now, we have around 35 employees. That's one of the largest "small" companies I worked for over the years. > So, the commercial angle. Well, blindly selecting, VB.NET or C# then. Maybe The project I just rewrote was partially implemented in VB6 (by me many years back). I sure hope VB.NET has improved on that? :-) > if you have a feel for the industry that you go to (say they are not > typically MS shops, but IBM or Sun), Java could be a choice too. I have worked for a few MS shops (abroad and local), but I'm really not a fan of MS. In South Africa the software companies are quite varied, though the open-source uptake is huge at the moment. > Don't try to rationalize a commercial decision with technical arguments. It > is pointless. You are correct on that point. :-) But I would still like to enjoy what I learn. ;-) > either MS or Sun/IBM. The size of the C# language scares me a bit though, > specially the heaps of modifiers, and new syntax every two years. Though for That's a very good point. I don't know much about C#, but from what I have read, many people seem to agree on that point. As for the C language. I really enjoyed that (many many years ago). But since I got hooked on Delphi / Object Pascal, productivity has increased a lot and the syntax is just so much easier to read. So I doubt I would return to C any time soon. Regards, - Graeme - _______________________________________________ fpGUI - a cross-platform Free Pascal GUI toolkit http://opensoft.homeip.net/fpgui/ _______________________________________________ fpc-other maillist - [email protected] http://lists.freepascal.org/mailman/listinfo/fpc-other
