Should A VisualC programmer, switch to C# ? if so when ?

[farhad_smx]

Hello every body !

I post this thread for discussing about future of VC++ and C# ...
please give me your idea about this two programming language !

[TheCPUWizard]

As I have posted many times.

The best language for a job depends on the job.

That's it, nothing more. Any judgement of what is a "better language" without being in the context of a specific job is meaningless.

[gjs368]

No programmer should ever 'switch' to any language; however, it certainly can't hurt if he should become proficient in a new language to compliment his present abilities.

True, you don't see many COBOL, FORTRAN, or Pascal programs these days, but they do exist - and if they are still useful programs, an individual who can maintain (or even better, convert the working logic to a more modern language without breaking it or recreating the core logic from scratch) is definitely worth having around.

[TheCPUWizard]

you don't see many COBOL, FORTRAN, or Pascal programs these days

I see them ot at least a monthly (average) basis. This is still an immense installed base of Cobol and Fortran programs in commercial use [including Object based implementations of these languages], and every Delphi program is a Blaise based program!

[gjs368]

you don't see many COBOL, FORTRAN, or Pascal programs these days

I live fairly close to the headquarters of a large retail chain which, I understand, still has several of these programs in daily use.

I suppose I should have said something like 'you don't find many new programs being written in FORTRAN, COBOL, or Pascal these days'...

[galathaea]

I might add that FORTRAN is still the defacto language for many major computational physics publications, and I had to do a lot of programming in it in my university years...

C# is an interesting language that I have only recently begun learning. But the markets it targets, such as distributed computing, are certainly becoming quite important to the profession. And I think learning about the various languages and other technologies that can provide solutions to this growing need will make one's marketability as a programmer grow over the next few years (demand has already been high for some time).

Also, I think it is important to a programmer to learn some of the more academic languages like LISP and SmallTalk, will help you understand many of the important design considerations that one will encounter as a professional programmer. These languages are rarely (though not never :p ) used in commercial applications due to their execution environment requirements, but they give excellent training in the general programming concepts used implicitly in all of one's coding. LISP is also used academically quite often these days in neural net models, and knowledge of this field is becoming more important in implementing AI learning models for ones own programs (used extensively in such various fields as gaming and speech recognition).

gj6386 is quite correct. It is important to be a programming polyglot as one moves into the professional world. At the moment, though, c++ is still my honey!

[dlorde]

If you're considering an extended career in programming, then it should be well worth investing some time with C#. An experienced C++ programmer should have little difficulty with C#, and it has the added bonus of a close syntactic similarity to Java. More strings to your bow!

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