From: surfunbear@...
Date: 2006-07-25T18:15:05+09:00
Subject: Re: Had Ruby interview, considering J2ME as well ...


gregarican wrote:
> What is your primary motivation for choosing a language? Is it
> prevalence in the job market? If so then from what I have heard there
> should be an increasing demand for Rails developers, although I don't
> sample the market currently so I wouldn't have a tangible idea.
> Learning Rails and then buidling upon that to further get familiar with
> Ruby shouldn't be that huge of an undertaking. Independently you should
> be able to get basic practical understanding under your belt in a
> couple of months on the side. But if you aren't seeing many job
> postings in your area for Rails developers then perhaps the selft
> taught route might be more for your own enrichment.
>

 There is not just one reason. I do need a job however. I have a ruby
project I have been working on on my laptop.



> But if you are looking for the most common languages in the job market
> I would imagine C#, C++, and Java would be the ones to tackle. You are
> correct in that the J2EE API is huge. If you get the basics of Java in
> your head then diving into the various API of J2EE, J2SE, J2ME, etc.
> isn't out of the question. It's not like a J2EE developer has
> everything memorized. The API documentation is someone's right arm in a
> lot of cases working with Java. That's why someone joked that the "Java
> in a Nutshell" book that O'Reilly prints is over 1,000 pages long! It
> actually is. Wow. Ick :-)
>

 I have done some java programming. I have done C++ for 10 years, and
Perl for 2 or 3 years. I don't feel motivated to write a J2EE app on my
laptop in order to learn J2EE. I like to read books, but ultimately I
feel I need to write code to be able to comfortably put something on my
resume. If someone wants to hire me to write enterprise beans or
something in J2EE I would probably be happy with that, but if I don't
have the experience they may not want to hire me. Without the
motivation to write J2EE code on my own, I'm probably caught in catch
22.

> If you do learn Java, then moving over and learning C++ or C# isn't a
> huge departure. It's kind of like someone who knows Ruby jumping into
> Python. Emphasis on "kind of like" I guess. At least the languages are
> related enough so it's not a quantum leap like learning Lisp and then
> jumping into BASIC.
>

> With J2ME the market should be there. Embedded application develop
> seems to be all the rage with all of the smartphones, PDA's, etc.
> saturing that market. Plus all of the other devices that run Java which
> are even smaller and more "dumbed down." Microsoft has their Pocket
> .NET Framework (or whatever they are calling it this week) so you could
> conceivably code something is C# and deploy it on Windows Mobile. Plus
> it seems as if they are starting to corner the PDA/Smartphone OS
> market.
>
> For me I never restricted myself to learning just one language. But I
> am more of a hobbyist too...
>

I focus on different languages at different times, but even one
language can take allot of time to learn well. Python sounds
interesting, not sure I'd care for C#, or .net.