klancaster1957 wrote: > If you are willing to be tied to a single platform, I don't think there > is anything intrinscally wrong with C#. Its a reasonalbe language, and > as you say, its growing. I can't think of any reason why I would > develop a Windows application in Java - in a pure Windows environment, > .NET beats it hands down. Ruby is great - but I'm not likely to create > a thick client in TCL/TK. (I'm keeping issues about whether I LIKE M$ > out of it - just looking at things from a pure productivity > standpoint). That's the thing. To compete against a crappy language backed by Daddy Warbucks, you need a language with a _much_better_ technical design. Only that bedrock can support you. Daddy Warbucks starts with languages invented by committees, and throws programmers at them to cover over their bad spots. Static typing is _wrong_, and the right alternative is linguistic support for _optional_ typing. This requires committees capable of _letting_go_ of the _illusion_of_control_, and publishing a language that might let someone, somewhere, get in trouble with their boss for emitting a "message not understood" error. Ruby's technical excellence permits much simpler libraries, simpler killer apps, and more elegant end-user-programmer code. When the pressure is on, those things matter. Florian Gro? wrote: > C# is heavily taking ideas from Ruby right now -- which is no surprise, > really. Then when you retrofit a language design feature, instead of building it in from scratch, you can't use it to simplify everything. Even its syntax will suck. Block closures provide an order of magnitude simpler designs. So unless you add them to a language first, you fill your legacy libraries up with cruft. Then when you retrofit them, they need more difficult syntaxes to compete. klancaster1957 wrote: > All that said, Ruby is the first language I've come across in a very > long time that actually gets me excited about programming. There's nothing to be ashamed of there. As engineers we have the _obligation_ to our customers to seek these sweet spots, and exploit them. "Excited about programming" is a _technical_ achievement, and it's a lot more valuable than millions of square meters of print advertisement space in Dr Dobbs Journal... -- Phlip http://www.greencheese.org/ZeekLand <-- NOT a blog!!!