> If people are going to take the time to learn a new GUI-capable language, > then I would recommend Java. It's whole design philosophy is to work on > any > platform (even if it can't quite live up to that philosophy yet), whereas > .NET is still intended for Windows machines only (have they created a .NET > framework for any other platform yet? Or was that just an empty promise?).
I smell the smoke of our favorite flame. And where there's smoke there's fire. I see a stack of emails on this thread, wonder if any of them are flaming... > The more people use Java, the more the creators will be driven to improve > its performance on the various platforms to make it viable. Hmmmm. I'd think after 10 years of the creators being driven would be enough to produce better performance and viability. But we see that's not the case. Don't hold your breath for another 10 years. Learning a language just because you like it's design philosophy isn't wise. You need to see if that design philosophy is actually implemented. Otherwise you might be joining the moonies and giving the Reverend Moon all your worldly goods so he can be rich because you like the philosophy of asceticism that he teaches. Or joining a war because you really think that by *killing* you are creating more peace in the world. Or giving up your rights because you think that really makes you free. Or working and slaving night and day so that your family can have "more" of what they need, when what they needed was really you all along. Ah, the examples are as endless as life is full of them. The bottom line with programming, IT, and life in general should be to do something because it works, not because we hope it will work even though it hasn't worked for the past 10 years. What's that old signature I've seen floating around here... something like "Theory worked in theory but in reality we found that theory didn't work". Can't really remember it exactly, but it makes the point that theory and reality are often different. Don't learn because of some theory, learn because of reality. If something is working in reality, it will also have a workable philosophy. If it doesn't work in reality, it doesn't matter how good it's philosophy really is. Perhaps we'll see some other language born out of the Java philosophy that will run much better than Java. A universal language that can be compiled and ran on any platform and works on any platform right out of the box. Hmmmm. I think C/C++ fits that bill. Many packages exist today that can be downloaded on win/*nix/etc and compile right out of the box (or tar.gz file as it were). And they run at blistering speed without the need of some other runtime environment besides the os itself. Let me digress to go read the other comments... _______________________________________________ msvc mailing list msvc@beginthread.com See http://beginthread.com/mailman/listinfo/msvc_beginthread.com for subscription changes, and list archive.
