What Language Next

[localzuk]

Personally, I would say Java. It is in very high demand in industry.

 

If not Java, c# as most smaller software houses seem to have transitioned to this as it is a very efficient and well structured language. Not to mention its integration with windows and the amount of features it has increases the speed at which complex applications can be written dramatically.

 

I would stay clear of anything related to vb. It encourages poor programming practices and the old vb has left an entire industry reeling with support being ended for it. C# wouldn't suffer the same issue, as it's implementation has been standardised and Microsoft is not the only producer of a runtime environment for it.

[torledo]

I think piqueaboo, localzuk and srocford are all on the money...

 

I think for sysadmins perl and vbscript are still the most useful languages.

Powershell is the next-gen for windows scripting so it'd be useful to start getting into that. But there's an awful lot of vbs scripts and skills that aren't going to be abandoned any time soon.

 

As for general purpose programing i think c sharp becomes more and more significant. It's the language of choice and .net as the platform for microsoft shops and software houses.

 

I think for most projects, web app development is the best direction for applicaiton portability, with dynamic elements through ajax and presentation seperation with things like css and flash.

 

For the presentation tier actionscript for flash is useful though not necessary if you're projects don't need that level of flash eye candy.

 

For the logic again c sharp comes into play for asp.net hosted sites......c sharp/asp.net is the heavyweight challenger to jsp based web projects. It's also essential for serious sharepoint development. And it's being used extensively to build custom CMS's for large in house asp.net web projects. VB.net is really c sharp but with the syntax to make those coming from vb6 feel slightly less uncomfortable with .net. I think it's the case that most coming from vb6 are using c sharp rather than vb.net for their projects.

 

php i would also recommend for webapp development also.

 

It'd be interesting to know how those people are getting on with RoR.....things have gone a little bit quiet on the RoR front following the hype during the middle of last year (around the time these posts wre made). Are people getting anywhere with it ? or is it a flash-in-the-pan pita and you've all gone back to php ?;-)

[el8linuxel8]

Depends what you want to learn it for, fun or a specific task?

 

PHP sucks as a language but being proficient in it is useful if you run a website.

 

Perl rocks, you can talk all you want about RoR but think about how much time has gone into Perl, its over 20 years old! and with the release of 5.10 its adopted a few things from Ruby, like simple things like say() so you dont have to supply a \n with a print()

 

Then you have CPAN? (cpan.org)what other language has got such a large module base?

"6569 authors 13454 modules"

 

i think you'll struggle to find anything that can compete in terms of quality in the modules either. Mightily impressive.

 

And like i said earlier, if its for fun then do C! drop ++ and #, C will teach you so so much more about memory management and how computers really work!

[witch]

Consulted with the other 'alf who is an enterprise architect and does or tells other people to program - he says Java for def, and then maybe .net or another of the more 'fashionable' ones.

 

Personally can't help - Basic and Assembler here!

[tmcd35]

I can, and hate, program(ing) in a few languages, and to be honest it all boils down to two things...

 

1) What it is your trying to code. You wouldn't use C++ to write a website just as you wouldn't use PHP to write an emulator.

 

2) What you find easiest to use. I use either Pascal or PHP because they are like old friends. I'm happy with them. The coding I do doesn't need to be efficient just functional.

 

If your happy with VB, why not update your VB skills, .net and all.