What languages should I learn?

[tummychow]

Yeah but that's the problem with them both. They're so.... platform specific. And that has its uses, but it's just not necessary in a lot of things. There was a discussion on here a while back about C#, I remember. The general tone, as I picked it up, was that C# was too much a Microsoft proprietary (which I believe it is).

[mcleano]

If you've got the time you should probably learn Java too. From looking around at uni courses(UK) it seems to be the primarily taught language so it can't hurt to have a heads start.

[helios]

Don't you know about Mono? Besides, it's not any more proprietary than Java, really.

[tummychow]

What? C#? Java isn't proprietary at all. It's more platform portable than a lot of languages (well, as someone once reminded me on these forums, Java only runs on the JVM.... but the JVM allows the same Java code to run right on many OSs, which is a reasonable idea.)

[helios]

Java isn't proprietary at all.

LOL.

[tummychow]

What?

[Duthomhas]

Java is a proprietary language. It is strictly controlled by Sun Microsystems. (Consider what happened when Microsoft tried to implement a Java compiler.)

The idea of a VM isn't new, but the JVM caused a lot of innovation in the field (both directly and indirectly).

[tummychow]

OK, well, I knew Java was under the control of Sun. (In retrospect, when I was saying proprietary, I was really thinking platform-portable. Wow..... I'm really a case.)
When did MSFT try to create a java compiler? That must have been pretty fun to watch.

[1yR4jE8b]

Java for the most part now is open source, with the few parts the could not be gpl'd in Java6 being rewritten and going to be open source'd in Java7. Java is far less proprietary than C#: the "open source" Mono implementation is developed by Novell who are now partially owned by Microsoft, which is why many (many) gnu purists consider it evil....lol

[helios]

Who makes the implementations doesn't really matter. What matters is who controls the language definition. In both cases they're controlled by a single company, not by, say, a standards committee.