Going to college w/major in computer science

[Agamemnus]

what about X#?

[toonski84]

C# is cute, but it'll never be a replacement because it's not easier than basic/pascal, C (compilers) are more powerful, and Java is more versitial. Cute language, though. Like ASP, but it sounds more like another marketing ploy by the big M again.

EDIT: i know you said x#, but I have no clue what that is and neither does google.

[Ninkazu]

Ya... x is right next to c on the keyboard

[LooseCaboose]

You probably wont learn any one language at College, because there is no single language that is approiate for every job. As others have mentioned C and C++ will always have their place when the programmer needs to work at a low level and in embedded applications.

Java is a big lanuage in modern application development, because it is well designed, clean, has an enormous amount of support (through tools such as JavaDoc) and is cross-platform (even down to embedded appliances by using PicoJava).

If you end up studying concurrent systems, you will probably learn a language called Ada which is designed with creating large scale threaded and distrubed systems. C/C++/Java are all capable of doing the same job, but Ada does it much better.

C# and other .NET languages are also going to be big in the future. C# is not simply a rip-off of Java as many critics have claimed, firstly because the language itself suppors many things which Java doesn't and secondly because the .NET framework is significantly different to the JVM. .NET binaries are JIT compiled on a per-machine basis and also allows unmanaged code segments (which means that you can mix C# and ASM/C/C++/Whatever) so C# doesnt suffer from the same speed issues that Java suffers from. .NET is also language agnostic, which allows coders to write in any language or combination of languages and link them without difficulty, the benefit of this is that a programmer can develop in which ever language they feel comfortable with.

XML is another language that is going to be very prevalent in the future, Mozilla currently has its entire GUI frontend written in XML. The major benefits of XML is that it is portable, text based, self-describing and highly flexible. My current software engineering project use XML as a save format, which allows us to simpy give someone else the DTD (document definition) and given an XML parser they can interpret it with another application.

Other languages you may end up learning at College include Prolog and Lisp for AI applications, HTML, XML, Perl, etc for Web applications, Bash, awk and TCL for shell scripting, Smalltalk and Eifel if you get into serious OO development and MatLab and Mapple for mathmatical use.

Your College will most probably teach either Java or C/C++ in your first year and then introduce other languages for more specific areas of computer science. You arent really expected to know any language inside out though (Ive been using Java and C extensively for three years and am constantly learning new things about each), you will find that once you start learning one, other structural languages are easier to pick up.

HTH.

[Agamemnus]

i thought i posted a link to X#

I guess not.

http://searchwebservices.techtarget.com/...10,00.html

[toonski84]

sounds like speculation.

I think .net is not as big a deal as they make it. Virtual machines like parrot can do the same thing. Microsoft is trying to capitalize on the business, and it will probably succeed, but c# as a language is not very useful.

[LooseCaboose]

.NET is not a virtual machine. This is one of the biggest misconceptions in the modern computing world, that .NET is basically the equivalent of the JVM. Apparently .NET is a big enough deal for Ximian (Mono), Corel (Rotor), and the FSF (DotGNU) to have to taken the time to develop .NET complaint frameworks. What makes you think that C# is not a useful language, how extensively have you used it yourself?

Combined with the rest of .NET C# is very powerful, because if it has a shortcoming you simply switch to another language, code the functions you need and can then link and run them without difficulty, with a language (implementation) like Java if you discover a shortcoming of the language, you are basically stuck with trying to find a work around in the language you are using.

One of the most interesting things about .NET is Microsofts development approach. The entire .NET framework is an open-design, which is how the other frameworks are being developed, Microsoft is also supporting these development of the other frameworks which run on systems such as Solaris, MacOS X and interestingly Linux.. .NET binaries are completely cross platform and only need a .NET complaint framework to run on, this means that to run a .NET binary or use a .NET webservice you dont actually need any Microsoft products at all, this is a very strange stance for Microsoft to take when one of its goals seems to be domination of desktop computing.