Clueless management is platform independent.

I think as a language C# is superior to Java. That being said, learn Java. The open source community alone makes it a much more attractive platform to build apps on. The number of choices in terms of frameworks + no vendor lock in makes it a winner. If you're serious about learning it pick up a copy of Effective Java by Joshua Bloch -- by far the best general Java book out there.

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.

Interesting article, but the author's selective memory and faulty logic continually undermines the point he's trying to make. My favorite was this gem:

"Past U.S. generations invented the airplane; invented the automobile; discovered penicillin; and built the Interstate highway system. The Baby Boom generation has invented credit default swaps; mortgage backed securities; the fast food drive thru window; discovered the cure for erectile dysfunction; and built bridges to nowhere. No wonder we’re in so much trouble.

This completely ignores developments like the personal computer revolution, the Internet, modern telecommunications, satellite technology, space exploration, advances in biotechnology, dramatic reductions in global poverty, etc, etc. I'm sure I'm forgetting some, but you get the idea.

The author would have done well to acknowledge that the reality of the situation is more nuanced than the picture he attempts to paint.

It's a bit presumptive to call men the reference case and to ask what's wrong with {universities, women} that has caused a drop in female enrollment. Maybe a better question is: Why are there so many men in computer science.

The article's author doesn't seem to really make an effort to figure out what happened, other than to reference one individual who went into health care.

I think exploring this question to its fullest would require dropping some politically correct guards and questioning quite a few gender assumptions, something that neither web forums nor national newspapers are particularly good forums for.

I wonder if there's a corollary: happy hackers hack; unhappy hackers read Hacker News.

(Goodbye, comment. I expect to see you disappear into the background under a barrage of downmods within a matter of minutes.)

I would be careful using PayPal. Another bounty site - microPledge - recently shut down because using PayPal to hold money in Escrow is against their TOS.

I wrote about it here: http://www.sitepoint.com/blogs/2008/10/09/open-source-fundin...

I'm sure there are a lot of project owners from microPledge looking for a new home, but using PayPal might just lead your down the same path.

I am a woman who has been programming professionally, on and off, for about 9 years, and full-time at a corporate job for two and a half of those. I was the first woman to be hired as a software developer at my workplace in almost 25 years. I hate my job, and next fall, I will enter grad school to go into an allied health profession. My reasons for leaving full-time software development are as follows:

1) The social interaction leaves something to be desired at my job, especially if you are not into gaming or D&D. There are few coworkers with whom I can discuss non-geek topics such as travel or food. This is probably due, at least in part, to having so few women around. The guys constantly revel in their geekitude. It gets old.

2) The work itself is isolating. I love to code, but especially during the long, depressing months of winter, I long for meetings to go to, or phone calls to receive.

3) Similar to the last point: I'd like to have a reason to leave my desk several times a day, for periods longer than it takes to get a cup of coffee or go to the bathroom. The highly sedentary nature of the job starts to make it feel like a prison.

In contrast to the last couple of points, my male coworkers act as though they would be happy if they never had to leave their desk chair to go to another meeting. Maybe this is just personality, and not a gender difference. Maybe I don't love programming enough to lose myself in it for hours at a time. I think some of these things, however, especially the social issues, may be indicative of basic female needs to have a connection with others, a feeling of being nurtured (and nurturing others), and good (female) role models. It would be interesting to see a workplace in which the majority of developers are women.

I recall reading about a study recently in which they found that men tended to concentrate in the hard sciences (math, physics), where women preferred sciences with a human aspect (psychology, biology). I believe they found that even women who had entered the hard sciences often ended up leaving them for fields with a more human touch.

The general idea doesn't need to be original at all. There was search before Google, social networks before facebook, video before YouTube, etc.

Sometimes the specifics of the idea can be important though. For example, take Google: lets use hyperlink data to rank websites

What's your idea?

Those examples are a bit of a stretch. The number of "normal people" who understand that they need new software written must be very small.

College kids who want a good, free game to play at a LAN party

College students pirate software. If they want a free game then who is supposed to fund the idea on your site? I don't think people want cheesy open-source games. They want quality graphics and good gameplay. You can't achieve that with a shoestring budget and without a team.

My mom, who wants a free alternative to MS Word that works well on Windows and is less intimidating than OO (and more powerful than Google Docs)

Does your mother really know that she needs someone to write an alternative to MS Word? She knows enough to seek out a developer and is willing to invest in software that no one else has used? I don't see people trusting their documents to an untested word processor and I don't think they would pledge money for it. OOo and Google Docs are good, free, alternatives.

Most open-source software projects are started as some hacker's pet project. If I'm going to get paid to write an MS Paint clone for the Mac then I'll keep it closed and sell it myself since normal people don't understand or care about OSS.

Also, half his examples weren't done by any "U.S. generation". The automobile was invented by a German, and Penicillin was discovered by a Scot.

siv?

I think the Systems Architect position earns that salary, not just a developer who uses that specific language. I don't think anybody is saying C# developers are paid badly, but that Java is open source in (I think) every way by now, and that means it will survive for a long time.

On the other hand, I'm never putting faith into Microsoft's development tools again, as nice as they are, because in recent history, Microsoft has killed off programming languages and tools at will, even their most popular ones. Microsoft makes developers depend on Microsoft's ability to update and improve their programming tools, in order to make the case they should charge for them, but has killed off popular programs or languages in order to concentrate on new ones, given that they themselves don't have resources to support all of them at once.