I was looking at job vacancies and all of them all said to the point of must have exp in C# or ASP (for web programming). These languages are as far as I remembered when they were first introduced, languages that were being pushed hard by Microsoft and part of their .NET plan.
So when the heck did Microsoft took over??? I thought C++ and PHP were reigning still.
Microsoft has been reigining in this area for a while. Ever since Win95 marched in, Visual* has been requested by most job openings that involve developing client-side programs.
I think C# is a transition from Visual Basic for most businesses.
I won't pretend to know what's going on server-side, although I suspect ASP mostly ate ColdFusion's lunch. If anything, the increasing number of *nix servers out there will likely make such things less popular.
<cue discussion of management herd culture>
Java, ASP and (increasingly) C# are the standard if you're looking at Business-2-Business EnterPrise Synergy Solutions type jobs.
That's the programming equivalent of being an accountant.
For real programming, C and C++ mostly reign unchallenged.
PHP reigns on websites programmed in somebody's mother's basement.
> PHP reigns on websites programmed in somebody's mother's basement.
Or designers, lecturers, basically anyone who isn't a hardcore web programmer who wants to make a solution not learn a whole goddamn language, right?
I think most my lecturers would rather be caught dead than seen making a page in PHP (all are computer scientists).
These guys would love to learn a new language to make a site. In fact, I think they'd love to make a new language to make a site.
Well, yes, that's pretty much what I said.
>>6
No it's not. I'm referring to the people who earn $50k/annum doing something other than web programming that thought they need to make a big flash website but a too tight to hire a professional, like yourself, to do it.
Incompetence has always dominated the business!
Yeah... I still think I covered that. And when it comes to web programming, I'm no professional, which is just as well - saves me from writing in ASP or some shit too.
So is it nowadays the people who use them are:
C/C++ - Academics
C# - Business people
That rite?
C/C++ is also for those who write the software that's on your hard drive right now.
Kinda sad to highjack the thread like this, but... Seriously, WAHa, why all the h8 for PHP? It does what it was designed to do and does it well. You don't like it, but that doesn't mean you have to insult it and its users at every chance, does it?
Jesus, chill out.
> PHP reigns on websites programmed in somebody's mother's basement.
Gotta love them stupid stereotypes of yours. Good job!
>>12
Some Perl programmers do this. As do some Ruby and Python programmers as they feel that PHP is not really a language, and it's somehow inferior. They're all fucking wrong, the programming language one uses to get a task done should be the most suitable one, not the "best" or "least suckiest" as their silly over-opinionated minds seem to think.
Ah, but that's where you're wrong - it doesn't really do what it was designed to do and it doesn't do it well. It was designed as a quick-and-dirty way to add dynamic content to web pages. I thought that was a great idea, and I've used it in the past for that. I liked the idea so much that I copied it when I made PerlHP, even if that was half a joke (doesn't stop me from using it, though).
However, with every iteration, it moves further and further away from that initial idea, and tries to be a fully-fledged programming language for writing arbitary web apps. But it wasn't designed for this in the first place, and this shows - it's full of kludges, questionable security practices, and half-assed programming constructs. As a general-purpose programming language it is a mess.
And while I think making a programming language that is accessible to non-experts is a laudable goal, PHP is not going about it the right way. Instead of offering the user easy ways to use good practices in code, it almost encourages the inexperienced user to write ugly and insecure code.
http://4-ch.net/code/kareha.pl/1120533289/9 summed this up much better than I could. Where a decent language has simple, secure constructs, PHP requires a mess of conditionals and obscure functions. Not even moderately experienced PHP programmers could really be expected to get this right, never mind all the inexperienced programmers using PHP to do these exact things.
Most larger-scale uses of PHP (that is, more than adding a little bit of dynamic content to an otherwise static HTML page) would be much better served by another language - I like Perl, of course, but Python and Ruby are also far better candidates than PHP will ever be. They all have higher barriers of entry than PHP, but not all that much higher, and the programmer will benefit from having a better idea of what she is actually doing. To repeat myself, I don't oppose the idea of a simple language with a low barrier of entry - it's just that such a langauge should go to much further lengths to protect its user from shooting herself in the foot, something PHP most certainly doesn't do (and which the somewhat more complex language DO).
In the end, I dislike PHP for much the same reasons I dislike Visual Basic. It's a simplified language that lets people write code without really understanding what they are doing, creating a huge base of badly written software, and re-inforcing bad design behaviours in novice programmers world-wide. And by its popularity, it is marginalizing the programming languages that would serve people far better (see how hosting companies without fail will offer PHP, but Perl support is not at all as common, to say nothing of Python or Ruby).
Satisfied?
>the programming language one uses to get a task done should be the most suitable one, not the "best" or "least suckiest" as their silly over-opinionated minds seem to think.
would that be the reasoning for C# and ASP as well?
/bin/sh ftw. No, seriously, I see more sites worth doing business with using LAMP (regardless of whether the P is PHP or Perl), and more software being done well in C and C++, than with ASP and C#. The decision to commit to MS languages is, more often than not, purely a management decision, and often made by companies that didn't have IT guys at the time.
Back on topic... Personally, I think MS took over the programming languages way back in the '70s with the horribly slow and mega-incompatible Basic language dialects found in most 8-bit PC ROMs.
> Basic language dialects found in most 8-bit PC ROMs
As far as I know, MS only produced GW-BASIC and BASICA. While they existed, they had to compete with numerous other BASIC dialects on other architectures. After the XTs passed on, those dialects no longer existed.
Once the 286 came along, MS had to complete with Borland, and then later Watcom and Intel. I personally think Borland dominated the compiler landscape for at least a decade. If you considered Borland and Watcom both, only scraps were left for MS (one scrap being QB).
It wasn't until Windows 95 came along that MS actually came out on top.
>>15
If your building a piece of software that is to be used on say, a UNIX system, both of those languages become unsuitable candidates as they weren't designed to run for UNIX even if mono and mod_asp try to bridge the gap and make them "work" to an extent. But if the said software was to be built and run on a windows system, then it would be suitable. Sometimes the 'choice' one must make for languages/IDE/framework etc isn't entirely based on OS, many many other factors make it up. Ignoring one of more of these factors and choosing personal opinion before a justified thought is what happens most of the time, and is why most times the wrong tool for the job is chosen.
>>17
The dialects of Basic found in the Commodore VIC-20, 64, 16, Plus4, and 128, as well as the Tandy Radio Shack TRS-80 Model 100, were written by Microsoft. The 100's OS was so exclusively written by MS that the main screen bears the letters "(C) 1983 Microsoft".
On a side note, Microsoft's very first software product was a Basic language interpreter for the then-new MITS Altair 8800 desktop computer. All one needed to run it was an Altair with 4 KB of RAM. Problem was, when the interpreter was released, no Altair at the time had more than 256 bytes of RAM, so Microsoft's first software product already needed 16 times what the hardware could give it. Microsoft's very first hardware product was a S-100 card, a 4 KB RAM card for the Altair, but it never sold well because not a one ever sold worked. Since then, the quality of Microsoft's products have improved only slightly.
Also, in the IBM lineage, Microsoft included a version of GW-BASIC or BASICA (often both) with every version of MS-DOS and PC-DOS until version 5.0, when it was replaced with QBASIC, a handicapped interpreter-only version of Microsoft's QuickBASIC compiler/IDE.
You're right about MS competing with others. But I think what happened is that, after the win32 API, MS released secret optimized APIs that only its own compilers can use but that competing compilers were locked out of, thus ensuring that only those programs compiled by MS's compilers can use new features and use them well.
Oh, and in the CGI war, Perl vs. PHP, let's not forget Python.
>>19: Enlightening history. Thank you. Didn't M-dollar also write the BASICs for the Apple ][s and ///s?
I'm trying to pick up on Python again (for the third time)... Thing is that most of what I write is web-centric stuff, and Python's support for writing web apps (at least, ones as simple as PHP files) seems to be both everywhere and nowhere… I'll keep looking into it.
Yes, that was interesting.
I still fail to see how they dominated since the 70s though. Perhaps it would be more accurate to say they dominated, lost it, then dominated again.
A curious thing I noticed about QuickBasic, which maybe you might be able to explain: interpreted and compiled code ran about the same speed. What was up with that? Using interrupts for everything?
>>20
To my knowledge, no. Both Integer Basic and Applesoft Basic were in-house projects written by Apple. I wouldn't be the least bit surprised if The Woz wrote them both.
PHP is the only CGI language I speak, but I understand the merits of the other P's for Web work.
>>21
I don't remember, so I have to guess. IIRC, QB sped up compiling by using a central run-time library for everything: BRUN10.EXE (for QB 1.0) through BRUN45.EXE (for QB 4.5). This library was loaded, TSR'd, and interrupt-driven. The reason interpreted code ran just as fast (or slow, depending on perspective) is that QB programs were always compiled before execution, even within the IDE.
MS also took this design philosophy with them into the Windows world with VB, especially the earler versions. How often I needed to hunt down a copy of the right vbrun300.dll or whatever version programs needed but the authors stupidly neglected.
So then can we say that the time when we can go back to like independent programming languages like C++, PHP and Perl etc etc in all programming is when Windows loses its dominance?
>>23
Not exactly. Both PHP and C++ can work on Win32 quite well and there are many C++ apps that work on Windows. Non-compiled (or JITC) languages might gain in popularity if Windows loss it's stronghold, so might the likes of ObjC, ANSI C etc.
> Both PHP and C++ can work on Win32 quite well and there are many C++ apps that work on Windows.
Err. All of Windows is written in C, and a huge part of all software running on it is written in C or C++. They are for all intents and purposes the primary programming languages for the platform. Saying that there are "many C++ apps that work on Windows" is about as useless a statement as saying that there are "many C apps that work on Linux".
Did you even try and read >>14? Apparently nobody else did either, because I didn't see any refutations of it.
>>27
What's there to refute? It's true.
>>22
From what I understand, Woz himself wrote Integer BASIC, but Applesoft was based on code licensed from Microsoft (my 1987-vintage IIgs has a "(C) 1977 MICROSOFT" on the physical ROM chip in addition to the Apple copyright, I noticed).
>>29
http://www.woz.org/letters/general/03.html
> WOZ:
> I wrote the original Apple Integer BASIC. I had wanted it to be the very first BASIC for the 6502 microprocessor. I might then have something to be recognized for. I decided that it had to play games and let me solve engineering problems. I first wrote out a syntax with floating point but then figured that it might be done a few weeks sooner with just integers. I had to write it in the evenings as I worked at Hewlett Packard then. So I cut back to an integer BASIC that I called "Game BASIC".
...
> Somehow, we wound up with a Microsoft 6502 floating point BASIC one day. I installed it (which involved a lot back then) and tested it. Since it was already near completion, and only needed some graphics commands added for our Apple, our own effort was best dropped.