Language Recommendation?

[Paul G. Allen]

"Chris K. Young" wrote:

[SNIP]
> 
> 1. C++ (_not_ C)
> 2. ASP
> 3. Java
> 4=. PHP
> 4=. VB
> 
> However, since you seemed to have looked at the adverts more recently,
> I'm happy to concede to your observations.

Having missed the rest of the thread, I can only comment that in my
company (more specifically, in my department, since that is usually the
limit of my influence) I stear everyone away from ASP, and VB for all
things, and Java for most. What do I recommend instead? The answer is
Perl and Javascript for CGI and scripting stuff, and C/C++ (not OO C++
either) in place of Java UNLESS there is a good reason that Java is
needed.
 
> 
> > It's a pity to say it (and this is beautiful holy war material) but the
> > PHBs who read the marketing materials often decide what languages are used
> > despite what might be most suitable.

I've found in my several of my most recent companies, it's the Sr.
engineers that make the decision, and it's usually based upon the extent
of their programming knowledge, not on what is best for the task at
hand. I think that their limited programming experience comes from what
you mention above though - confining their knowledge base to "the
language of choice" according to marketing hype.

> 
> I should snarf this, but only if sigmaker (the signature generator
> program I use) can chomp it down to three lines or less. Hmm...looks
> like it fits!
> 
> > Also here's another tip: hand coding HTML is a rare skill. According to
> > one of the people from the Web Standards Project, only five out of a
> > thousand professional web designers at one of his seminars could do it.
> 

I can believe that.

> Aye, agreed. However (and this is even rarer), being able to hand code
> HTML and CSS is even better.

I can't tell you how many "good" web designers I've found that can only
design a web site using Front Page - a very bad thing - and do no hand
coding at all. I usually use Star Office to quickly layout the page,
then hand code the rest.

I have yet to find a need for CSS, and I often find it to be problematic
regarding portability in that I can load someones web site in one
browser/platform and have it look completely different than another.
Using straight HTML, I can generally make a web page look the same in
all browsers/platforms.

PGA