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I've programmed in VB5 (and a little VB6) in the past, used MS Access at a 'writing code' level but this was all a few years ago and I've only used PHP more recently. I'd like to get back in to programming for the PC (Windows...) but not sure where to go with a choice of language. VB.Net? C#? ....any suggestions? Something easy to pick up, simple to use for creating 'small' desktop utilities, that sort of thing.
VB.NET is conceptually different enough from VB5/6 that you might almost be better off going with something completely new.
Plus, Jeff says he gave up on VB.NET because he had such a hard time finding decent code examples. C# is everywhere.
I use C# if I'm in .NET. I like it well enough, but then I got here via Java, without a whole lot of VB experience.
At the risk of getting downvoted to oblivion, I disagree with the many C# and VB.NET suggestions. Whilst I've played with C# (not VB.NET) and it's a very impressive and versatile language/toolkit, if I were you I'd attempt to broaden your horizons by going for something with decent cross-platform portability such as Python.
It's a fun language to play with, easy to learn, teaches good habits, and if you find yourself looking for a new job in a couple of years time, at least if it's a non-Windows development job, you've got a skill you can take to the party.
I think that if you have used VB6 and Access in the past, picking up VB.NET should be a breeze. In many ways VB.NET will let you do what you've done before, but with much more structure and a "real language" feel rather than a "scripting" feel compared to the past.
A .NET language - VB.NET or C# is a good idea. Lots of information available, and you can get the Express versions for free. VB.NET may be an easier transition, based upon your previous experience. Be warned though: C# is more popular, which means there are more tools and code samples available.
Check out related questions:
Which language should I pick up: vb.net or C# and
Usage Statistics: C# versus VB.NET
If you like to build 'small' desktop utilities, that sort of thing that does not require the .NET framework to run, you might want to check out BCX. It is free.
BCX is a small command line tool that inputs a BCX BASIC source code file and outputs a 'C' source code file which can be compiled with many C or C++ compilers.
Using BCX and a C compiler enables you to produce powerful 32-bit native code Windows console mode programs, windows GUI applications, and Dynamic Link Libraries (DLL's) without having to incur the costs of an expensive commercial BASIC compiler. The programs that you create will be among the smallest and fastest 32 bit executable programs around, requiring no additional distributed runtime modules.
URL: http://bcx-basic.sourceforge.net/
if your already familiar with vb5 and vb6 and your just building small desktop utilities then I would recommend vb.net
if you have used VB, VB.Net seems like the natural choice.
If you wanted something specifically for creating simple desktop applications you could look at a scripting language with Tk such as ruby or python which also might also give you a change to learn a new language with different features.
Most probably VB.NET would be best for you, although I prefer C# when write for Windows and C++ with Qt when application has to work on other platforms as well.
The conventional wisdom says that the programmer "upgrade path" from VB6 leads to VB.NET...I do not agree with the conventional wisdom. I used VB6 day in and day out for almost 10 years. Now I use C# very comfortably.
Compared to the conceptual differences between COM (VB6 is based on COM) and .NET, the syntax differences between VB.NET and C# are minor. On the other hand, there is much better support (from both MS and the community) for C#.
I heartily recommend that you give C# a try.
While it might be a little more difficult for you to pick up than VB.NET I think you'll appreciate the gains in the maintainability of the code you produce.
If you have used VB5/6 and VBA before, VB.NET should feel pretty familiar. However, VB has become object oriented after version 6, so there is some new things to learn.
If you want to broaden your knowledge a bit, C# is a good alternative.
I would recommend learning some C# even if you want to go on to VB.NET. They both use the .NET framework and compile into nearly identical IL code, so most of what you learn in C# is useful in VB.NET also. It's also quite useful to be able to translate between them, as you then can use coding examples in either language.
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I’m new to visual basic.net. I have experience in C++ programming, but never created gui with it so learning vb.net for some quick gui development. and i want to learn vb.net. I can’t install visual basic express on computer cause i’m on shared computer and such huge install is not possible on that computer. So i picked up sharpdevelop.
After searching most of the tutorial, i found out that most of tutorial written for visual studio IDE for vb and vb.net. I’m trying to learn vb.net in depth from command line to gui programs. Any good recommendation of tutorials, book ? I searched google but very few results so far. I’m looking for good learning tutorials that can help learn with sharpdevelop.
any suggestion for tutorial and books that mentions sharpdevelop in their tutorial/guide ?
Firstly - if you are thinking about heading into .net, you might want to consider starting off with c#, especially because with your background it will be a bit easier, but if you need to learn vb.net, ofc there is nothing wrong with it, just in my experience your earning potential is higher with c#, and vb.net is kind of dying out (at least in Europe).
Second point, you should focus on starting your development either for web or for win forms, this will give you a sense of direction. Learning a new language takes some dedication.
I also think you're putting yourself through unnecessary punishment by not using the tools provided by Microsoft for your development. In my experience Visual Studio, MS SQL and Microsoft Word, are the best products to ever come out of Microsoft. Even the express editions are of a good quality. If you can head over to an internet cafe and download it from there, shouldn't cause such a problem surely to have it installed on that computer, after all its going to be used for personal development, not just playing games or wasting time.
might not be the answer you wanted, but its the best advice I can give at this stage, hope it helps....!
Also this is said from personal experience, because I've been down that road, and I promise you I found developing with MS supplied IDE's much more enjoyable, and in the end, kept things viable.
I don't see how a "programming language" (like VB.NET) book is written for a specific IDE (like VS), even if the author mentions some instructions to do with VS (menus, settings, etc.), you should be able to follow along with him, because SharpDevelop simulates VS quite well.
I've never seen a .NET book which talks about doing things in SharpDevelop rather than VS, because VS is far more popular IDE, although some authors mentions the IDE as an alternate to VS.
There's a good book authored by SharpDevelop team which teaches C# techniques using their IDE, and its digital format is free, its name is Dissecting a C# Application: Inside SharpDevelop, although there's no VB.NET version, AFAIK.
Another comment, I don't see why an experienced C++ programmer would learn VB.NET, if you want to learn a robust, quick GUI .NET language, go ahead and learn C#.
Good luck,,
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I'm reasonably familiar with the various forms of VB that existed prior to .NET (VB6, VBA, VBScript...), but have yet to delve into The Sweet New Flavor that is VB.NET.
So I would very much appreciate it if someone would provide a quick summary of the major differences in the language brought about by VB.NET.
Assuming when you say vb you mean vb 6.
Pretty big. The original visual basic does not use the .net runtime environment, and although they have similar names, they are pretty much too different languages. Visual Basic is not fully object oriented, but VB.net is. Error handling is vastly different between the two. VB.Net has try catch blocks where traditional vb uses On Error GOTO statements. These are just a few differences. The list goes on and on.
Here is a link describing the "Visual Fred" Name.
Oh the horror.
Sorry, but all existing answers are wrong in some way or another. Joel’s is actually the best of the bunch but its poor wording encourages misunderstanding (sorry, Joel – but just look at your comments!):
contrasting VB.Net with VB is not possible, because they are the same thing.
That’s exactly like saying that “contrasting apples with fruits is not possible because they are the same thing,” and as such not very helpful; especially since many people (still) use “VB” synonymously with “VB6.”
So, to clear things up a bit: both VB6 and VB.NET are dialects of the Visual Basic language family (let’s call it that). Their resemblance is superficial at best; someone who has actually used them both (and not only looked at some source codes) will have noticed that apart from a cursory syntactic similarity, they are completely different beasts. Using them are fundamentally different experiences.
The only aspect in which they actually resemble each other (apart from said syntax similarity) is that they both are very well suited for rapid application development (RAD) … at least until you’ve tried dynamic languages such as Python or Ruby in combination with GUI agile frameworks such as Shoes. But even as RAD environments go there’s a huge difference.
VB6 was basically developed to do RAD, nothing else. And in its time, VB6 was the best thing on the marked to do RAD, by a large margin. VB.NET, on the other hand, was not singled out for RAD development – any more than C#. Both are high-end languages backed by a general-purpose framework, much like Java but with the aspiration to improve on some of Java’s faults, such as its over verboseness by cutting a lot of boilerplate code (introduction of delegates, events, properties, operator overloading, autoboxing to name but a few such features).
And while VB.NET is to a large degree backwards compatible, this is very misleading. First off, no sane person would say that C and C++ are the same languages just because a lot of C programs compile fine on C++ compilers. The differences between VB and VB.NET are even bigger by some metrics because no complete VB6 code is valid VB.NET. It needs an automated “upgrade assistant” to produce valid .NET code, and experience has shown that this upgrade assistant is unsuitable even for medium-sized projects, mainly because its literal translation breaks many guidelines and assumptions of the .NET world.
Saying, like Kibbee, that the compilers of VB6 and VB.NET are “basically the same” is flat out wrong. Likewise, claiming that “the .Net runtime is not a change to the language” misses the point completely. Of course it’s a change in the language. VB.NET was completely build around the .NET framework, it’s not just any other library.
He claims that
If VB.Net was meant to be a new language, and not just a new version of an old language, they would have got rid of "On Error Goto" which they didn't.
– which is likewise misleading. “On Error Goto” was included solely for backwards compatibility (the upgrade assistant cannot convert old-style error handling into exception-based error handling).
Let me sum up the main point of this rather long posting so it doesn’t get lost: Just like Java and JavaScript, VB6 and VB.NET have very similar names (and for very much the same reason, too: marketing) but this is entirely misleading. There are a few syntactic similarities. Apart from that, superficially as well as under the hood, they are completely different languages.
VB.Net is just the version of Visual Basic intended to work with the .Net framework. It also makes other changes and additions to the language, but contrasting VB.Net with VB is not possible, because they are the same thing.
What you can do is contrast with VB.Net with VBA, or VB6, or VBScript, or some other variant of Visual Basic. But VB.Net still IS one possible variant of VB. In fact, if you look at the language part of the product by itself, they're now calling the latest version VB9, with VB10 due out later this year.
In the same way, you can't contrast "Pespi" and cola, because Pepsi is a cola, but you can contrast Pepsi and Coke.
That said, the VB.Net dialect of VB brings a significant number of changes and improvements to the language, including true support for object oriented and functional paradigms, to the point where idiomatic VB.Net code is often very different from VB6-era code.
There are quite a few - too many to list I think. You could almost consider VB.Net a completely different language that shares some similar syntax to VB. The biggest change is becoming familiar with the .NET classes.
VB.Net is a newer version that uses the Dot Net Framework / managed code.
VB is the old version.
VB compiles to p-code or native code, VB.net compiles to MSIL. Also the syntax differs a bit. As VB.net is the upgrade path for VB users and programs, there are a bunch of helper objects and functions that makes moving code from VB to VB.net easier, these objects and functions aren't normally used in programs written in other .net languages.
On another programming related website, I saw this line in someone's signature. This is NOT the first time I've seen such sentiments, although this is the harshest:
"People who work in VB or any variant
thereof are not programmers, they are
circus chimps throwing feces into an
IDE..."
VBA is my bread and butter and I can automate quite a bit of stuff with it. Yes, I know it lacks polish and some functionality, but why so much negativity toward it? On the flip side, what do other languages have that VB doesn't?
VB6, VBScript, and VBA have the reputation because they just aren't industrial strength languages. Notably:
No OOP. Sure, you have classes and modules, but no inheritance. VB isn't a low-level language, it needs real objects.
No first-class functions, so you can't even simulate OOP or polymorphism.
Lack of a well-developed class library. VB6 has a small library of built-in functions, and almost all other functionality is delegated to Windows calls or (usually pricey) third-party components.
Lousy error-handling. ON ERROR RESUME NEXT is a pox on the planet.
Although its not the fault of the language, VBA earned a bad reputation by association with MSAccess.
Of course, VB wasn't really intended to be an industrial strength language, so maybe nothing mentioned above is really proper criticism of the language at all. Fortunately VB.NET and the latest versions of VBA fix everything above, so VB.NET is on par with any other "serious" language in the marketplace.
[anecdote]
In defense of VB, I find most people criticize the language just to go along with the status quo, not because they've actually used it.
A few years ago, in a chatroom, I ran across young neophyte railing against a VB6 developer for using such a crappy language. I innocently asked "what's wrong with VB".
The first thing he said was "Because its a WINDOWS language!" So I pointed out that Borland Delphi is a Windows only language*, but I've never heard anyone malign it for that reason. (* There was a product called Kylix which cross-compiles to Linux, but its expensive, buggy, and discontinued. Its been a while since I've used Delphi, but last I'd heard, its still not ready for Linux.)
So, he said "It has a HORRIBLE SYNTAX!" Is that really the reason people hate this language? I'd say Perl, Lisp, and C++ are worse on the eyes than VB.
Next, he says "Its too easy to learn!" Well, I'd consider that a point in favor of the language. I'll never write a GUI by hand if I have a drag-and-drop designer at my disposal. What else you got?
So finally, grasping at straws, he comments "It has... no string manipulation functions". Left, Right, Mid, Replace, InStr and Trim. QED noob.
Interestingly, VB has features found some "hacker" languages, namely variant datatypes and duck typing. Compiled code performed reasonably well, interop between COM and native windows DLLs was easy, and the GUI editor basically set the bar for all future RAD development.
[/anecdote]
Read some of Joel Spolsky's articles and you'll feel better about yourself. From his article Working on CityDesk, Part Three:
Visual Basic is an extremely productive way to write code, especially GUI code. Want bold text on a dialog box? It's one click in VB. Now try doing it in MFC. You have to create a subclassed control, it's a big mess, you have to know all about LOGFONTS and Windows window subclassing and a bunch of other things and you need about three lines of code once you have the magic class.
But many VB programs are spaghetti, either because they're done as quick and dirty one-offs, or because they're written by hack programmers without training in object oriented programming, or even structured programming.
What I wondered was, what happens if you take top-notch C++ programmers who dream in pointers, and let them code in VB. What I discovered at Fog Creek was that they become super-efficient coding machines. The code looks pretty good, it's object-oriented and robust, but you don't waste time using tools that are at a level lower than you need. I've spent years writing code for C++/MFC and years writing code in Visual Basic, and let me tell you, VB is just much, much more productive.
This simplicity attracts a lot of new programmers. Saying there are a lot of bad programmers using Visual Basic does not mean Visual Basic is a bad language; it simply means that Visual Basic is accessible to bad programmers (AKA new programmers).
I work in a place where all the code is C#, not VB .NET. One developer wrote most of the code. You know how he achieved this feat? Easy: He copied-and-pasted all over the place. A given method might have anywhere from a few to hundreds of copies throughout the system.
Good developers can be good in any language. Crappy developers can be crappy in any language.
Also just to note that VB, VBA, and VB.NET are all three different languages even though they might share some similar syntax. There's no real difference between VB.NET and C# (besides the keywords/syntax), so we shouldn't lump VB (6 and before) and VBA in with VB.NET.
The real problem that many programmers have with "VB" (just say all 3 of the languages) is really more about the people using it. Most of the time "VB" programmers have less formal education and write sloppier code. That's not true for all "VB" programmers (and that doesn't mean there's not sloppy code written in C++, Java, C#, etc.). It's just the typical expectation that someone who doesn't use VB has when they hear about VB programs.
Meh, these are just religious bigots.
There is no one true language, and most experienced folks not only know that, but instantly recognize these statements as a glaring sign of inexperience.
Average developer quality seems to be inversely proportional to popularity of language * ease of use of language. VB is very easy, and is/was widely used.
This is because
A) there's a demand for coders in popular languages, so every employer has to either lower their standards, raise their pay or go without developers.
B) people without a clue can still appear moderately productive in easy to use languages. There are enough libraries and GUI tools that they can slap together something that looks useful, even if it's complete garbage under the hood.
There's nothing inherently wrong with VB when used in the domains it was intended for, by people who know what they're doing. The same is true for almost any tool/language.
I dislike the language, but that's mostly because I worked with a vb-like language which stripped out absolutely anything that might be considered an advantage and forced "best practices" that really didn't make sense.
The biggest problem I have with VB is that there is an almost direct track from clueless non-programmer -> part time Excel/Access scripter -> VBA "guru" -> VB "programmer" -> lead programmer on the most important project in the company.
Honestly I wouldn't have believed it if I didn't see someone follow that path right in front of my eyes. I even tried to mentor the guy so that he would be familiar with OOP, exception based error handling, etc. but he just dug his head in the sand and wrote everything procedurally because that had always worked for him.
I have had a chance to work with VB.Net and as long as I treated it like an object oriended .Net langauge first and VB second it wasn't so bad. It would never be my first choice for a new project, though.
I'm visiting SO in between writing VBScript code and that statement really rings true to me -- I am currently a circus chimp. If you don't know anything else, VB and its variants seem like great languages.
In my opinion, the reason for the negativity is one basic statement -- On Error Resume Next. This makes bad code a feature of the language. If it didn't have this, it wouldn't have near the bad publicity...
Most every developer I know has worked at one point or another with a VB developer, or a developer with a heavy VB background that just didn't have a clue. Unfortunately, as with most things, all we remember are the bad things about something. So we relate VB to bad programming.
It is certainly not true that all VB programmers are poor developers. But when everybody has stories about "This one old VB guy I used to work with." The stereotype is spread.
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I'm at a stage where I am forced to learn Lua, so do you have any suggestions on how I do this? I don't have a lot of experience with any other scripting languages than PHP.
So, some suggestions on "head start Lua"-pages?
EDIT
As an addition to the wonderful tutorial pages, could you please suggest any "programs" I could make that will help me learn Lua? Imagine I would want to learn Pointers in C++, I'd make a Linked List. I want to touch the basics in Lua but meanwhile be open to pretty advanced stuff.
First of all work your way through the Programming in Lua, it should take you a day or two to get the gist of Lua.
However I can tell you right away on your first time through ignore coroutines and metatables, they are very powerful, but take a while to grasp. First learn the syntax, scoping (same as PHP luckily for you) and the standard libraries.
After that go back to coroutines and metatables, read them try them and by the third time through you might get it. Unless you have a very good CS background these are complex topics
Edit: The book is free online == website. Besides it is the best tutorial out there on Lua, everyone learns Lua with it.
Also: If you're purpose is Lua for World of Warcraft (probably not but just in case) you can check out this tutorial
And: Here is a tips and tricks thread on StackOverflow, might help give you some ideas of what to expect from Lua
Suggested Programs/Exercises:
Since you're initially looking at Lua for web development try to understand and improve the Data Description example in PIL. It'll give you a few good ideas and a nice feel for the power or Lua.
Then you might want to try out playing with the Data Structures chapter, although Lua has a single complex data-type, the Table, that chapter will show you Lua-like ways to make a table do anything you need.
Finally once you begin to grok metatables you should design a class system (yes with Lua you decide how your class system works). I'm sure everyone that knows Lua has made a dozen class systems, a good chapter to get you started on a class system is Object-Oriented Programming
And if you got time and know C or something like that (C# and Java included) try extending an application with Lua, but that'll take a week or two to do
Funny to see all these elaborate lists (though they are certainly correct). Back in 2002, I read about the first 20+ pages of the Lua reference manual, and started using it. It really is that simple. Lua (and ANSI C) are of the few languages that really fit in one's mind all at once - and stay there. For the others, at least I need to constantly do some relearning.
Be aware that getting to think in Lua will take time. I think mine was 6 months or so. When coming from C/C++, we tend to solve problems in certain ways. Lua might offer better means (i.e. via use of tables) but it takes a while to start seeing those. This transition to a higher abstraction level is similar to the Assembler->C shift in the 1980's. Many people still coded a while in C as if it only were a portable assembler.
There is also a large body of projects related to Lua at LuaForge.
If you happen to use Windows as your day-to-day platform, then I would recommend getting the Lua for Windows package as a nice starting point. It includes a wide array of useful modules all prebuilt and installed together with the Lua interpreter.
After your first pass through PiL and the reference manual, you will want to read Lua Programming Gems which is currently only available in a paper edition.
<plug> Do consider buying the books through the associate links at Lua's books page or LuaForge to support the projects. </plug>
Edit: As for ideas for programming projects where Lua is suited, look for problems where the table provides leverage. Tables are central to Lua, since even the global variables are just fields in a table. Tables can be indexed by values of any data type except nil, but have an especially efficient implementation if used as arrays.
One quirk that trips up people coming from a C-like background is that all things in Lua are naturally indexed starting from 1. Strings are indexed from 1, arrays start at 1, etc. Don't worry about it too much, there is nothing wrong with using a[0], but the length of the array given by #a is defined assuming that the array began with a[1].
Another quirk is that functions don't really have names. They are first class values that are usually stored in some variable that has a name. Syntax sugar makes it look like they have names, but that is just a convenience.
Metatables are a particularly Lua-ish feature of tables (and other types, but that is a really advanced topic) that are the basis for most of the schemes for doing object-oriented things in Lua.
Closures and true tail calls are other features of Lua that aren't often found in small scripting languages that can really make some idioms easy to implement.
In addition to the suggestions above, there's also the Lua wiki which is well worth a browse. There are a tremendous number of code snippets and small recipes there which can be useful.
I wrote a short quick-start guide to Lua for people using it on a project I was working on.
If you are familiar with other scripting languages it may get you up and running quickly.
The docs on Lua.org are very good and should cover most everything else you need. Lua is a pretty small language and can be learned fairly quickly.
This is a pretty general recommendation, but if you want to get started in a new programming language as a software engineer, it's fun to start doing the problems found at Project Euler in your new programming language. I've been doing this with Python recently and found it to be inspiring and bring a lot of enthusiasm to the coding.
You could install World of Warcraft and make a mod for that (it uses Lua). Actually that's probably a bad idea.
Maybe try to integrate Lua into a .NET application (assuming you are a C# programmer) and do something 'fun' with it:
Using Lua with C#
Or just browse lua.org
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Has anyone here given the Fantom programming language a whirl? (pun intended).
My first impression:
I like the ability to have the code run on either the .NET or Java VM.
The syntax is nice and clean and does not try anything fancy.
I have a belief that "the library is the language" and the developers of Fan believe that their USP is their APIs:
But getting a language to run on both Java and .NET is the easy part - in fact there are many solutions to this problem. The hard part is getting portable APIs. Fan provides a set of APIs which abstract away the Java and .NET APIs. We actually consider this one of Fan's primary benefits, because it gives us a chance to develop a suite of system APIs that are elegant and easy to use compared to the Java and .NET counter parts.
Any other thoughts, first impressions, pros and cons?
It looks very inspired by Ruby. It says that it's RESTful but I don't see how exactly. Compare with boo, which is more mature yet similar in many ways (its syntax is Python inspired, though).
The design decisions to keep generics and namespaces very limited are questionable.
I think their explanation sums it up:
"The primary reason we created Fan is
to write software that can seamlessly
run on both the Java VM and the .NET
CLR. The reality is that many software
organizations are committed to one or
the other of these platforms."
It doesn't look better than all other non-JVM/.NET languages. In the absence of any information about them (their blog is just an error page), I see no reason why they would necessarily get this righter than others. Every language starts out fairly elegant for the set of things it was designed for (though I see some awkwardness in the little Fan code I looked at just now) -- the real question is how well it scales to completely new things, and we simply don't know that yet.
But if your organization has a rule that "everything must run on our VM", then it may be an acceptable compromise for you.
You're giving up an awful lot just for VM independence. For example, yours is the first Fan question here on SO -- a couple orders of magnitude fewer than Lisp.
For what problem is Fan the best solution? Python and Ruby can already run on both VMs (or neither), have big communities and big libraries, and seem to be about the same level of abstraction, but are far more mature.
I have never heard of Fan until a couple of weeks ago. From the web site, it is about one year old so still pretty young and unproven. There are a couple of interesting points however: First the language is tackling the problem of concurrency by providing an actor model (similar to erlang) and by supporting immutable objects. Second, the object follows the example of Scala with type inference. Type inference allows the programmer to omit type declarations but have it computed by the compiler providing the advantage of short and cleaner code as in a dynamically type language while preserving the efficiency of a statically type language. And last, it seems like a very fast language, nearly as fast as Java and really close or beating the second fastest language on the JM: scala. Benchmark showing the performance can be found at http://www.slideshare.net/michael.galpin/performance-comparisons-of-dynamic-languages-on-the-java-virtual-machine?type=powerpoint.
This is very interesting.
Java (or C#) was created in order to eliminate Platform dependency by creating a JVM (or CLR) that will compile the code into a specific machine code at run time.
Now , There is a languege which is Virtual Machine independent? umm .... what the hell?!?!
Again , this is a very interesting topic , That might be the future...:) going to one universal single languege
I think it looks like a great language feature-wise, but I'm not sure how useful it is. I don't think it is all that useful to target .NET and JVM. Java is already cross-platform, and .NET is too, with Mono. By targeting two VMs, you have to use only the APIs that are available on both. You can't use any of the great native APIs that are available for Java and .NET. I can't imagine that their API is anywhere near as complete as either Java's of .NET's.