Bitten by a spider

My internship has saved my life. I was so confused about what to work on before it, now everything has been clear and unambiguous to me. I worked extensively on JavaScript, Ajax, advanced CSS, and complex JavaScript frameworks. Weird or not, after I came back to school, all those puzzling concepts I was frustrated at just solved themselves. Principles of operating system look so similar as those of JavaScript frameworks, and the reasons of design choices just became natural and making senses. It feels great and I feel I was bitten by the spider too, and I turned into a super hero over night.

The choices for me

With that confidence, overestimated or not, I would like to start digging deeper into Java or .NET. They would certainly stay popular for a longer time, if not always the most popular ones. The power and reliability of desktop applications are still way better than those of web applications. J2EE used to be one of the hottest technologies, now its extended language features and new graphic library can possibly bring it back to the competition of RIA again. On the other hand, the SilverLight, part of .NET 3.0 framework, is ambitious to rule out others. Although Microsoft has been criticized over the recent years for its “closeness”, Windows developers are nonetheless still highly desired by many mid-sized companies, for the unification and simplicity Windows platforms offering.

“… I feel I was bitten by the spider … and turned into a super hero over night.”

Work lying ahead

Picking up a new language quickly is nothing to brag about. Getting in-depth knowledge about the features of the frameworks and their advanced applications is the real catch. Although the frameworks share same philosophies in many aspects nowadays, I should at least be specialized in one of them and know the trade-offs made among similar components in other frameworks.

I guess I will go with Java first. C is a fun, flexible, and fast language, once I managed to figure out what are pointers and pointers to pointers, but it’s not that convenient to reuse existing code. C to the computer is so much like JavaScript to the browser, I enjoy working at lower level, but life is much easier to work with Dojo. C# is quite much like Java and Java5 is so much like C# too. An analogy here of the two could be the relationship between JavaScript and ActionScript, they share the same standard, but the DOM’s (Libraries) they operate on are different.