Doom and gloom!

The skills shortage is not a myth. I've seen it myself among people hired on
various programming teams. There are a lot of folks scamming employers into
thinking that they are programmers.

I am 50 and still very much in demand as a programmer. Trouble is, so many
projects are afflicted with a lack of seasoned staff that they are
floundering. There is a definite market for seasoned pros.

Of course, if you insist on not progressing in your career, and are pretty
much the same programmer at 40 or 50 or 60 that you were at 20 or 30, you are
going to have trouble competing as a programmer.

Most programmers leave the profession by the time they are 40, it appears.
They get "promoted" to management or make some lateral move that takes them
away from software development. Senior programmers have less competition at
that level than you might think.

Off-shore (not really a verb, but English is flexible that way) teams require
close management by the on-shore staff to be effective. That means that
domestic programmers have opportunities to work with companies that use
off-shore staff.

Programming is a necessary profession, like the oxygen tech on a space
station. Without IT society would not function any more. Without programmers
IT will not function. There will always be a demand for programmers until
software itself is obsolete.

You have to understand your market and position yourself properly, just like
in any other business.

- Lew

What input are you looking for?  It sounds like you just want to hear
good things about Java.  There are Java magazines that will have lots
of pro-Java stuff.  

This thread was about which was better for a beginner.  The truth is
that .Net has made tremendous grounds since it's release, and has made
the choice between Java or Microsoft purely a preferential thing.  

With Java you get "cross platform", with .Net you get "faster and
optimized for Windows".  There is a time and place for each.  Java is
a good choice for academic/school environments where the goal is to
focus on learning how operating systems work and such.  It is also
good for mobile phone apps.  .Net is good for rapidly putting together
websites or Windows apps.  The thing I like about it is that it is
also quite scalable and fault tolerant on the upper end of mission
critical, highly available sites.  So you do rapid development if you
want, just to get a working prototype out there, but you can also
develop meticiously and achieve a scalable solution that supports
thousands of concurrent users.

I did Java development for about 7 years, but kept an eye on .Net as
it emerged.  For the time being I have switched to C# because the
tools are better, the end result is faster, and I do at times develop
rich-client apps where I want to utilize a lot of the latest and
greatest UI bells and whistles.  The newest set of bells and whistles
that will be on everyone's desktop soon is Vista, and .Net gives you
an advantage toward utilizing these features of Vista.

On the same hardware, .Net is faster than Java on Windows or Java on
Linux.  There used to be a case made for Java because some of the Unix
hardware was faster than what was available with Intel architecture.
However, the recent crop of Intel processors has changed all that, and
with quad-cores coming out next month, it makes an even stronger case
for .Net in my opinion.

Try this:

http://snipurl.com/z6h1

I'm quite amazed too.

I'll give you my opinion. That's a very complex question.

The professional market requires knowledge of platforms, not languages,
so when you choose a language, you'll study its platform for your
professional work.

So, learning "many languages" is quite a myth, because after a couples
of years from start, when you'll have _real_ experience, you can't go
for both, because either you have experience on J2EE _and related
technology_ or you have experience on ASP.NET _and related technologies_.

Most of people telling they know many languages are "professional
amateurs", which mediocre skills in the specific languages. They still
can work without any problem in the IT market, because high skills are
not a requirement.

So, I can say what I think of various platforms:

* Java: very mature and used platform. You're guaranteed to "survive"
for many years. But its presence is constantly decreasing.
Java is a very clean language, and I would suggest it to beginners.

* .NET: some IT fields seems like prefer this platform, for example when
you look for Oracle jobs, you very often find the couple Oracle + .NET,
and I don't know why. Its presence is constantly increasing. You're
guaranteed to "survive" for many years.
C# is a more complex and "powerful" language, but being more powerful,
it can be very misguiding.

Wandering in the IT companies, you can found real messes done in C++,
because of its "power".

How long will it take for .NET to reach Java diffusion? Who knows? Point
is: maybe another platform will outstand both.
It you're very into IT, I think Ruby in the future will do this, but
still before of this, there will be a reasonable number of well-paid
positions.

---

Eventually, I think the chose of Java or .NET is more or less the same.
I'd choose Java if i'd be more conservative, and .NET if I'd be more
"adventurous".

Of course, if you learn and _really_ study Ruby, it would be very
interesting.

Bye,
im