Any Python Gurus?

[Psionicist]

A few interesting essays on Java:

http://www.paulgraham.com/gh.html
http://www.paulgraham.com/pypar.html
http://www.paulgraham.com/javacover.html

I mostly agree, I know exactly 0 great programmers who use java freely in his spare time. Its a code-slave language, not a language used to build Great Things.

 

[carpedavid]

As a professional developer, I can attest that the market is headed toward C#. That said, there are a lot of shops that have legacy code in VB6, but they're all heading toward .net. Those shops may be more comfortable with switching to vb.net in the short term so that they can leverage their existing resources.

So my recommendation would be vb.net or C#.

 

[Vascant]

Vascant, i'm a bit curious about that statement.
Why is java not an professional language yet?

/Fenlock

Just my opinion.. If you have ever played with SmallTalk then you would understand why I made the statement. (I am not shooting down people who use Java either, heck I used it for a radius front end back when nothing else existed.)

I think it really depends on what market you are heading into, I designed AI system for the transportation industry. So my answers are based off that experience.

*chuckles* If you ask me, I say learn ASM.. However understand I have never worked for a small company. Most of the places I have worked do some really odd stuff, like we would use vb6 for a front end and ASM for the engine because we need a type of speed only ASM can give. The speed of a GUI between VB6 and the related products are at worst only a few ms difference. So why bother spend time and money into it.

 

[Fenlock]

please dont take this wrong, but using the "java's cover" as an argument today is not good.
the author is predicting that java will not be succesfull based, not on his experience with the language, but on hearsay and rumors. in 2001 and was an interesting read and he did set himself up to be proven wrong.
Here in 2005 java has spread out to all fields. True, not as far as it was hyped to be (but c++ was hyped in its heydays too: "hey! write the code once and recompile on another platform, its magic!" ). And a lot of very interesting frameworks exist in java, some as genuine new ideas other asimplementations of features from other languages (even some features from .net), just look what is happening at the apache repositories.
What i am trying to say is that the article is wrong. You could change all the authors references to "java" with ".net" and you'll have a set of predictions a lot of people would agree to. But it all depends on which side of the fence you are sitting at

Just to clarify things, i have been a professional programmer for nearly 10 years. The last couple of years using C#, but at home i use java for prototyping/developing. I prefer the language java for its simplicity. I think that the CLR is technically superior to the java vm, but it has its own set of problems (esp. unmanaged code blocks).

But the OP did not ask what language would be most widespread in 3 years. He asked what language he should learn before a deadline in two weeks (actually he said he had choosen VB6, and most ppl screamed no at him ) In that case he need documentation, examples and a good IDE (notepad is not an IDE) and i know that is obtainable with java. It can propably be that he can get visual studio or another IDE for vb6/vb.net/c# but i dont know, so i cant recommend it...

VB.6 would be good enough to get a passing grade in two weeks. If the OP has the right tools. You can do some fast and loose prototyping in a few days and the debugger is excellent. As long as he proptly forgets everything afterwards

Everything else equal; Python is propably the best choise: Its an immediate language with an interactive shell and very good documentatiion. Its free and available on all major platforms. And it teaches good programming behavior.

/Fenlock

 

[ender_wiggin]

Umm, no offense or anything, but can we debate VB6 somewhere else and just try to concentrate on the issue at hand?

For the record, I'm using "learn" as a loose term. I'm going to college next year with biomedical engineering major in mind; I don't plan on becoming a programmer by profession. This is a senior project. Just learn as much as I can in the time that I have. Nothing more, nothing less. I have the VB6 studio and I'm not interested in getting anything else.

When this is all done, I may look into the other languages you recommend if I'm interested. Right now, I'm interested in a grade.

That being said; how do you make tabs?

 

[drothgery]

That being said; how do you make tabs?

There's a standard tab control.

 

[Fenlock]

http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/d...us/vbcon98/html/vbconusingtabstripcontrol.asp

sorry, its been a long time since i've done any vb6 windows programming..

 

[ender_wiggin]

Why don't I see the control? Shouldn't be on the left toolbox?

 

[drothgery]

If you don't (and you're not using a crippled version of VB6 that's missing some controls), just right-click on the toolbox and add it.

 

[J-Buzz]

If you right click on the toolbox (one the left of the screen) and select components you should see a list of controls that you can add to the toolbox. (tabbed strip is not a default control).

Should see a Microsoft Tabbed Dialog control.....

Can also select Projects->Components....from the menu.

Sorry drothgrey said that......Too many Programming language debates going on got in skim mode.