Geek Advice required - C# or Java

[fido]

I need to learn one of the above languages, but they both look pants (and this is from someone who knows Assembler, Fortran, Matlab, C etc.) Which one is better, more popular, going to impress techies etc? Or to put it another way, which one would you learn if someone is paying you to to go on a course ..

[GHW]

imho there's not much between them - choose based on what you're likely to need to use it for.

[hawkaye]

Not a techie myself (well, only code xhtml/css ) but all the guys at my place of work use Java, seems to be pretty cool. I think they did C before that, in fact, is C still being used?

[Spokey]

fido said:

they both look pants

Yep, they're both shite, full of gubbins to make it easier for idiots to bolt together clumsy, inefficient piles of utter crap.

I'd take the course that is in the nicer location.

[fido]

Spokey said:

I'd take the course that is in the nicer location.

Hmmm, the C# one is near a strip bar in Kings Cross. Will go for that one. Cheers.

[kiwisr]

Definitely the Java one.

[twister]

hawkaye said:

is C still being used?

In the big wide world of non-desktop software development, absolutely. Some embedded systems have the luxury of sufficient extra memory and processing power to handle the overheads of anything more exciting than vanilla C, but many are still built down to a tight cost requirement that precludes the use of hardware which provides anything more than the bare minimum of power/storage. I once had the "pleasure" of inheriting a piece of embedded C from another engineer, running on a microcontroller with 1KB of flash memory and no RAM - all the variables and stack were stored in the 16 8-bit general purpose registers... with a target environment like that, you *really* need to know how the compiler behaves (or, as I found out in this case, doesn't behave) in converting each line of C into assembler. Ahh, happy days

[RobDickinson]

Java w Eclipse vs C# Bis studio is a close call realy.

Plenty of work in both, C# is IMO a little more advanced and has learnt from Java's mistakes but its mostly a wash.

[GnuBee]

C# has plenty of work from grunt level through to senior level. Do a search on Jobserve and see which language offers the most roles that you're interested in and at the right rate or alternatively do a course on one and learn the other yourself.

Interested to know why your opinion of both languages is "sh!te" though; Sounds like we have fairly similar programming backgrounds i.e. assembler -> C -> C++ -> Pascal (Delphi) -> C# and whilst I admire the contract insurance possibilities presented by assembler I'd much rather be using C#...

[anonymous-user]

I'd say it all depends on where you want your career to go if you actually plan on using what you're learning. TBH, they're so similar it's not difficult to learn both. My main job is Java development as the company's software is a Java stack. However, there are certain tasks that I find easier to achieve in C#, so do so.

[slapmatt]

If you like Microsoft, learn c#. If you don't, learn Java.

[dern]

Having done both commercially they're pretty much the same. One benefit of c# is that there's fewer apis that you need to be conversant in but one benefit of java is that there's always an alternative api to do the same task should one of them turn out not to do what you want. I personally prefer java simply because with 10 years of java and 1 year of c# I can get a better rate with java. I also prefer the eclipse ide to the msoft one and I like the fact that there's always a new api to learn.

Edited by dern on Tuesday 15th January 09:47

[cottonfoo]

slapmatt said:

If you like Microsoft, learn c#. If you don't, learn Java.

Yup, main difference is Java is cross platform, C# is not. Plenty of work in both though.

[Fetchez la vache]

To be honest MS copied so much of Java to make C# that learning one will get you more than half way to learning the other.

Go via Jobserve results and your gut instinct

[onomatopoeia]

hawkaye said:

in fact, is C still being used?

Yes, but only where external constraints prevent me writing assembler.

Can't speak for anyone else though.