Fuel for your Friday flamewar

It’s Friday, which means it’s time to gather at the pub over beer and engage in debate! Programming languages, especially ones by Microsoft, are always good for raising ire and blood pressure. May I suggest, for your reading pleasure:

• 101 Reasons Java is Better than .NET, for earlier this year.
• A recent rebuttal, .NET Truth takes on the “101 Reasons Java is Better” list, which Robert Scoble points to in his blog
• The Old Guard fires back with A number of reasons C/C++ is better than Java
• The polemic Lots of reasons I want .NET to fail and fail badly

I personally have no religious tendencies when it comes to programming languages, other than an aversion to Perl. To close, allow me to quote Master Yoda and his opinion of Python vs. Perl…

EXTERIOR: DAGOBAH — DAY

With Yoda strapped to his back, Luke climbs up one of the many thick vines that grow in the swamp until he reaches the Dagobah statistics lab. Panting heavily, he continues his exercises — grepping, installing new packages, logging in as root, and writing replacements for two-year-old shell scripts in Python.

YODA: Code! Yes. A programmer’s strength flows from code maintainability. But beware of Perl. Terse syntax…more than one way to do it…default variables. The dark side of code maintainability are they. Easily they flow, quick to join you when code you write. If once you start down the dark path, forever will it dominate your destiny, consume you it will.

LUKE: Is Perl better than Python?

YODA: No… no… no. Quicker, easier, more seductive.

LUKE: But how will I know why Python is better than Perl?

YODA: You will know. When your code you try to read six months from now.

(Taken from the Python Humor Page.)