Ask HN : Which should I learn : C# or Java

From my experience of working with both Java and .NET I can say that: the weakest part of the .NET technology stack is community, and the strongest part of the Java world is community which produced the huge pool of quality, free and open-source frameworks. Currently Maven repositories count for more than 14,000 unique artifacts and almost 60,000 versions (http://www.mvnbrowser.com/faq.html).

C# is a nice language, but when you have to develop a real-world application, it does not help much. .NET simply lacks too many essential tools and frameworks. You can do basic things with it, but when you have a non-standard task at hand, you are alone to implement the solution by yourself or pay for crappy third-party closed-source component. Even for trivial tasks. Want a decent HTML parser to sanitize HTML documents? Write it by yourself or pay for crappy third-party closed-source component. Want to read email messages from the server? ... you got the idea. The list goes on and on. I am currently working on a C# project which has integration with source control systems. We had to invest a lot of time to write our own framework and providers for several most widely adopted tools, such as Subversion and Perforce. If we based our project on Java, we would saved lot of time on development by choosing Maven SCM providers, which are free and open-source. Another example is that we needed a decent audit history for the documents in the database. Again, we had to develop somewhat working home-grown solution. If we based our project on Java, we would simply pick open-source Envers framework (http://www.jboss.org/envers/) which does exactly what we need for free.

And I hate Visual Studio. It offers a little more than a notepad with syntax coloring and debugger. It is horrible for coding and those variegated wizards and diagramming tools don't make me productive either. Being unable to attach third-party source codes is a huge PITA. Eclipse in size is just a fraction of the VS installer, but still is feature-packed, better for refactoring and has a plenty of plugins. Speaking of IntelliJ Idea, it's simply the best IDE ever.

.NET build and CI tools suck, there is nothing to compare with Maven.

If you like to learn new languages, I think there is nothing to beat JVM in terms of variety programming languages running on top of it. Just for example, the most notable ones are JavaScript, Python, Ruby, Groovy (Python-like language with Java-friendly syntax), Scala, Clojure (Lisp-like), CAL Language (Haskell-like) and many more. By the way, JVM by itself is quite a decent piece of engineering.

My experience makes me think that Microsoft is trying to be popular at any cost, targeting inexperienced programmers, intentionally oversimplifying their solutions, making simple things trivial, complex things impossible. The Microsoft culture is to give you a big bright flashy button, which does a lot of things under the hood, but when accidentally it breaks, you are unable to guess what is going on and how to fix it. Living in the world of closed-source .NET code makes me cry.

So the conclusion is: choose Java over .NET, but learn more uncommon programming languages as well. Haskell, Lisp and Prolog were huge "brain-washers" for me.

I would go with C#. There are lot's of people who say that you are subject to Microsoft's directing of the language, but if you go with Java, you are subject to Sun/OS direction just the same. C# is a great language and ASP.Net is great for the Web. It's not popular to advocate a Microsoft product here but I'm very happy with C# and ASP.Net. Your goals will be the ultimate factor in your decision though.

I don't think the time-line has as much to do with it as the scope of the changes do. Again, this is personal opinion; and I'm speaking from the angle of someone who has spent many years doing consulting work on the Microsoft stack, and having to deal with figuring out which ways the 9-to-5'ers are going to break things next.

Version 1.0 of the C# specification clocks in at 405 pages. There was an addendum in 1.2 that I'll leave out, because it was a respecification of 1.0.

2.0 came along and added 117 pages of specification - including generics, partial classes, iterators, and a handful of other things. On pure specification, that's a growth of 25% to the core language. (I know this isn't really scientific, but I think you get my drift).

Then in 3.0, just 2 years later, the spec is back to over 500 pages (just for the language!). This version added a bunch of functional paradigm stuff to the language, lambdas, linq and the like.

And now in 4.0, they're talking about making C# essentially a dynamic language.

Now, all this being said, I really do like C#; but I think that it behooves everyone who likes C# to admit that it's a large and evolving language; the paradigms that Microsoft keeps adding to the language don't really seem to fit from one version to the next.

I love IntelliJ IDEA, it kicks some serious ass: http://www.jetbrains.com/

The last time I used VS was with VC++ 6.0, so no clue how IntelliJ compares.

As a ten year veteran of Java, currently learning C# (the world is full of irony), I can say that Java is a simpler language. There are a bunch of bones thrown to c++ and assembler focused guys in C# making it a more complex language to master. And I dispute that VisualStudio is a better IDE than IntelliJ. So, my honest opinion is start with Java.

Spend time writing code, and just as importantly, reading it. Read through Spring, Hibernate, et al. Understand the architectures, the trade offs, and the code tricks.