Cameron McKay

Channel 9 has posted a great talk by Anders Hejlsberg, the original author of Turbo Pascal, the chief architect of Delphi, and the lead architect of C#.

History lesson: Anders was lured away from Borland by Microsoft with a hefty offer of a $1.5 million signing bonus, a base salary of up to $200,000, and options to buy 75,000 shares of Microsoft stock.

Looks like it was worth it, as each C# release has added many interesting and powerful features, while maintaining a fine balance between complexity and simplicity.

During a recent project of mine, I had to do a lot of enum manipulation using the .NET Enum class and I have to say I wasn’t impressed. Besides the shortcoming of it not being a generic class (and thus not being especially type-safe), Enum also has some strange inconsistencies in terms of how it handles matched integral types.

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As I was working on the PHP classes that Fep was to map to, I realized that it was rather silly for me to re-invent an API for lists since there were already many well-designed ones in existence. In particular, I’ve found that the .NET 3.5 collections API to be particularly nice to use. Moreover, since everyone and their dog and using .NET now, it would also be familiar to most programmers. Thus, I’ve decided to use a subset of the .NET collections API for Fep collections.

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The syntax of a programming language is a large part of how a programmer interacts with a language. Being somewhat of a programming language enthusiast, I’m always curious about how different programming languages stack up syntactically.

Today, I’m going to take a look at an variety of programming tasks and show how they are done in both Java and VB.NET (the .NET 1.1 version). Since both these languages have differing feature sets, I’ll try to only use features that both the languages have, in order to compare them fairly. I know this might misrepresent the complexity of the languages, and I’m cool with that. The purpose of this post is merely to explore and discuss the syntax of each language.

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Sometimes when you’re programming, you’ll want to generate an HTML document. This may be because you’re writing some sort of web app, or maybe you want your program to be able to output in a web-friendly format.

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