Fanbois downvoting, eh?

Have you ever bothered to read the notes on Windows 7 updates? You'd be disgusted to realize how many of them "may require a system restart". Over half. WAY over half.

Same here, and that's on an *ancient* NVidia card (fanless 8600 IIRC) and a P4 3.8GHz with only 800 MHz memory.

Raw Debian had some issues with tearing prior to their latest driver updates from NVidia, but I've no doubt those issues have been addressed with their latest stable release (which has newer drivers.) Most of the tearing was with Flash playback, though -- VLC did a pretty good job with upscaled 720p videos.

If you're going to consider obsolete languages (the keyboards are no longer made) I'd nominate Prograf. It was a dataflow language that would have been great for multiprocessor systems except for two problems:
1) It was released for the Mac System 3 and never successfully transitioned to later systems, and
2) There was no text representation of the programs, it was all graphic, which was quickly too verbose to handle as the programs increased in size.

Not clear on what you consider "good". The ones that occur to me are WxWidgets, Qt, and Tcl...which can be good depending on your purpose. All of those can be used on Linux, Apple, and MSWind, and probably on BSD. All of them can be used from C, C++, Python, and Ruby. And, I assume, other languages.

If you want a good graphic builder IDE, then Qt has some quite decent tools. I'm not sure about WxWidgets. Tcl used to, but they seem to have died of neglect.

Then there's Java which goes its own way, and has it's own GUI, and IDE with a gui-builder...but while adequate for many purposes, I find the Java gui to be limited even when compared to Tcl. Still, it *is* cross-platform.

So I guess it comes down to "what do you mean by 'good'?".

If I read the article announcing the release correctly, then while the basic C# language is (probably) open source, it's definitely not free. You can't make a version of it without the agreement of MS, and the released version by MS is ... incomplete. Parts of it are portable, others aren't. So you can only use it as MS desires.

IIRC the release agreement said something like "permission is given to any full and complete implementation that fully implements the specifications" I forget whether the specifications were subject to unilateral change by MS, but even if they weren't it means that the language cannot be implemented by anyone except as desired by MS. Also, of course, the libraries were not made available, which reders it essentially useless except on MSWind machines.

Now just because their public promise didn't allow something doesn't mean that they won't ignore any "infringing" code as long as they feel like it. But it does mean that only a trusting (characterization deleted) would put their own time and effort behind it...without some form of idemnification.

So I'm going to pass on C#. It'd rather trust Oracle's Java (which I also avoid, though not all the time).

Different langaguages are different.

OTOH, I disagree with the basic premise of the article. It is my belief that one shouldn't learn a new language to improve ones job prospects, but rather to improve ones skills as a programmer. So if you know C++, then you don't learn C# or Java, but rather Eiffel, Lisp, or Haskell, or possibly OCaML.

OTOH, If you already know C++ or Java, it's certainly easier to learn Python or Ruby. So easy that a basic knowledge can be learned in a day. So if you're tight on time, that will allow you to expand your capabilities in small increments. (But a basic knowledge won't teach you the libraries, which is where the important differences lie.)

FWIW, I first learned Fortan, actually FORTRAN, since it was before Fortran 77 was standardized. But then I went on to Snobol, PL/1, etc. I never did really master LISP1.5, but I didn't have access to a running implementation. With Lisps a decent IDE is nearly a necessity to start with. (Currently, if you want to pick up a lisp, I'd recomment Racket Scheme from PLT. It's got a decent development environment.)

OTOH, I dropped C++ about 20 years ago, and am no longer fluent in the modern dialect (something I keep meaning to correct). My current favorite language is D (Digital Mars D, or dmd), before that I cycled between Ruby and Python. Before I retired I normally wrote in whatever my employer chose, which, towards the end, was MSAccess Basic...a really foul language. So foul I wrote routines in Eiffel that did the work and just used the MSAccess Basic as a driver. Not only was it faster to write, it was also faster to execute, and unlike MSAccessBasic, the programs wouldn't arbitrarily start failing after a few months of use. (In the AccessBasis I used to need to save the programs as text files so that I could re-import them after the system corrupted them. Figuring out that there wasn't actually anything wrong with the programs took a lot of quite furstrating debugging, since a newly entered program would work properly. It's my guess that the system was storing some invisible binary code in with the source, so the source became unusable when the code got corrupted...why the code ever got corrupted I never found out, but it happened repeatedly to many different programs.) I presume that MS has by now fixed the problem, but it persisted over at least 5 years and multiple different versions of MSAccess.

That's a reasonable thing to expect, but it doesn't seem to be a part of the current US political culture. Is it even any longer a part of the Japanese political culture?

Things may have improved, but you still have to reboot for far too many Windows updates for a daily update cycle to be anything other than frustrating as hell for most people. Microsoft used to be hated for that before "Patch Tuesday" was started. I guess they never learned their lesson, and are going to drag the public kicking and screaming back into the daily boot cycle.

What a shame they couldn't have learned their lesson and either started issuing patches that don't require reboots for the most trivial of changes, or stick with "Patch Tuesday" to minimize the pain for the user.

I was lucky enough to learn how to program in Neuron Data's toolkits before the 1.0 release of the GUI components were released to the public. I rode that gravy train for about 15 years before the market imploded, with a peak of $120/hr. in the mid-late '90s.

But I didn't choose that route -- I got lucky that something I knew well turned out to have relatively high demand (at least compared to the number of people who really knew that tool well.) I could just have easily been unlucky enough to learn one of the other two GUI toolkits that Northern Telecom was evaluating at the time.

On the database front, I missed out -- I was tasked with evaluating the first release of Ingres, and have never seen that product again in my entire career. Fortunately I was able to wrangle some Oracle work and training with my Ingres SQL experience, and from there sidestepped to Sybase ASE, DB/2 LUW, and SQL Server. But I had to work at becoming an SQL expert (cross-platform); with the GUI tools, I just got lucky.

On the major downside, most of my GUI experience is now useless because the only place you'll find Neuron Data left in are old legacy/maintenance-mode applications. There is no new work being done with Open Interface Toolkit.

Now I feel left out, the Commodore PET's we had in school did not have mice, or hard drives, or usb. Just a keyboard and a 5.25" floppy drive. :(

Those who try to classify mere coding as "programming" are the same ones who think you can teach "anybody" to "program." The problem is they have too low-balled a viewpoint on what the art of programming is. Calling a coder a programmer is like calling an apartment painter an artist; the jobs are only vaguely related. Slapping paint on a wall is no more "art" or "talent" than coding is compared to programming.

I'm not talking about understanding the business; I'm talking about translating the chatter of those who do understand the business into algorithms, models, and architecture. I'm talking about having the knowledge to choose from the various platforms and frameworks available.

You can't just walk someone through a course and have them learn that. They have to have the passion to learn about those things on their own, and they have to have the talent to understand those issues and concepts.

You can teach someone to spew the buzzwords; that doesn't mean they know jack shit.

The truth is that programming isn't a passion or a talent, says Edge, it is just a bunch of skills that can be learned.

Competent, basic programming may be, but there is also an aspect of art and talent to it that can't be taught no matter how much the "we don't fail kids here" people might wish it weren't the case. Companies aren't looking for competent programmers -- they offshore those jobs. They're looking for the exceptional talent that can drive the whole process from top to bottom, including issuing the designs and models those "competent" programmers are expected to work from.

I may not believe in the "10x programmer", but I most certainly do not believe that just "anybody" can be taught to be good programmer. I don't believe that of anything except the most basic of manual labour jobs.