Learning Java
Recently I had a small discussion with a friend about what language he should choose for a personal project of him. He was doubting between Visual Basic and C#. I believe he decided to go with C# as that would be compatible with Mono (a cross platform variant of C#) and well, an other reason was that is another language the he normally used.
Personally I don’t like working in VB as it has some, not quirks, but behavior issues that don’t match my style of programming (Comments are done different for one).
I do like C# a lot as it looks like C++ (call me shallow if you want), but I have worked in that language for quite some time at my previous job and I found that the Graphical User Interface used by Windows (.NET components) to be a little bit lacking. Now I could buy a professional components (like Devexpress) but I’m not that rich and frankly my experience with it has not yet been enjoyable, most likely because I’m still getting used working with (at my job).
Recently my interest in Linux has been rekindled thanks to Linux Mint and I decided that if I’m going to write software I don’t wish to be limited to one platform. By the way, I only share this view as a software developer and not as a game developer.
After some thinking I decided to try out Java. The criticism that I had about Java 6 years ago have all been gone, so I decided to check it out again.
I have been playing around with it that past three days (1~2 hours each day) and I’m enjoying. Eclipse is an awesome IDE and the only thing I really find lacking is the fact that I can’t drag and drop components as it is done in VS2008. Not that I mind because creating a form (a shell in Java) is quite easily done. I still have a lot of thinking to do about the application I want to write (it’s one of those applications you try to write from time to time) and see if I can actually get it to work.