Teaching languages -v- Industrial languages

zdragon wrote: »

wrong wrong wrong ..
please tell me that you are not a programmer.otherwise I'll be very disappointed.

Well I have been a programmer for over 22 years and I would go further: I've reached the sad conclusion that in a corporate environment Java and C# have been a disaster in terms of productivity and maintenance!

Lets take a fairly straight forward task - you've got files arriving into a folder at random times during the day in 4 simple formats and you require them to be written into a database table. Now give this task to a Java or .Net programmer and the mole hill becomes a mountain....
- First they'll extend the stream reader classes and throw in a few parsers to handle their four different file types
- Next they'll add some OR classes to handle writing of the data to the database
- Of course they will also have a play with the data access library and come up with some more classes to provide database connectivity
- Next they'll create some classes to monitor changes in the folder content and raise events when they occur
- Of course now that they have events they need to handle them and so the story goes on....
And before long you have a monster on your hands!!!

Now I've seen this happen over and over again, as I worked on projects in C++, Java and later C# - what should have been straight forward task become something else altogether! No matter how elegant the solution might appear if fails when it come to "bang for the buck"....

Through this forum I've discovered Python and I can see why it is getting notice - productivity plain and simple. Straight forward task can be achieved in very few lines of code and there is still the power there to do more complex task when required. This recession, the competition from outsourcing and so on means we must work smarter if we are to be competitive and I just don't see using something like Java or C#, which promote over engineering, as working smarter...