Welcome to the Lounge

Mike Hankey wrote:

Why do people subscribe to FB

M.D.V.

If something has a solution... Why do we have to worry about?. If it has no solution... For what reason do we have to worry about?
Help me to understand what I'm saying, and I'll explain it better to you
Rating helpful answers is nice, but saying thanks can be even nicer.

fgs1963 wrote:

FB was new (.edu only) when my kids started college. I thought “Nice. Something for the younger crowd.” Once they opened it up to all comers I knew it would lead to disaster.

rnbergren wrote:

Social Security numbers or credit and debit card numbers

rnbergren wrote:

Why do people put their real birthdate on FB

A Brief, Incomplete, and Mostly Wrong History of Programming Languages[^]:

1996 - James Gosling invents Java. Java is a relatively verbose, garbage collected, class based, statically typed, single dispatch, object oriented language with single implementation inheritance and multiple interface inheritance. Sun loudly heralds Java's novelty.

2001 - Anders Hejlsberg invents C#. C# is a relatively verbose, garbage collected, class based, statically typed, single dispatch, object oriented language with single implementation inheritance and multiple interface inheritance. Microsoft loudly heralds C#'s novelty.

• Generics are different, weaker. The syntax sometimes feels oddly backwards too, eg public <T> boolean containsAll(Collection<T> c);.
• foreach loops don't use the foreach keyword, but that takes about 10 seconds to get used to.
• Since there are no real delegates, Java tends to use interfaces with a run method (or equivalent). That also affects how events work. You can use anonymous classes that implement the relevant interface though, you don't have to create a thousand full classes.
• Inner classes by default have a reference to a specific instance of their outer class. To get a "plain old inner class", it needs to be a static inner class, which is not a static class. That sounds more confusing than it is.
• Operator overloading doesn't exist. Not even for String. Avoid == between objects (including String, but also Integer), unless you really meant to compare for reference-equality. And yes, BigInteger arithmetic is pretty painful in Java .. but also pretty efficient actually. BigIntegers in C# only recently approached how efficient they are in Java.
• In terms of the framework, List<T> -> ArrayList<T>, and Dictionary<K, V> -> HashMap<K, V> (some tutorials may mention Hashtable, disregard them).
• There are no unsigned integers (except char but we don't talk about that), which for the most part doesn't matter (many operations are independent of signedness, and there are special methods such as Integer.compareUnsigned to implement the operations that are dependent on signedness) except that Java's byte is signed and you will probably occasionally forget that and get some bugs due to unintended sign-extension.