Whats the Difference & Purpose of...

[BStoltman]

Please Explain the difference and general purpose of each language and how they can relate to each other. I am looking into learning some of these languages, and want to add professional web design to my resume'. I am proficient currently in Visual Basic, and Visual Basic.NET, as well as some C++, and XHTML, and have dabbled with PHP.

* ASP.NET

* ADO.NET

* C#
(I have heard something about people writing in C# to interface with ASP)

* Microsoft SQL 2005
(What is the difference between ASP and Microsoft SQL)

* AJAX

* LINQ

* Python
( I also read somewhere google was written in primarily Python. Whats so great about Python, and why don't we hear about it more if it is so powerful?)

Thanks for your Information...

[scragar]

ASP.NET is a successor to ASP, I've never used it though.

C# is microsofts "improved" version of C++

AJAX = Asynchronous Javascript and XML, it's effectivly a buzz word refering to the use of XMLHttpRequest to allow one to get content from the server without needing to reload the page, and pretty much renders frames unneeded.

Python isn't as powerfull as some languages, but it's easy to learn and still has a lot of power without getting too complex.

The other few I don't know about, I've not developed anything on windows or for a windows server in a long time.

[rpgfan3233]

Actually, C# is the first true .NET language. C# can't do anything without .NET other than create variables and functions/methods/whatever-they're-called (there are also languages that use the .NET library that have come into being after C# became popular, such as Boo and F#). I personally see it as a melding pot of C++ and Java.

Python is easy to learn, as scragar mentioned, but the steps necessary for using it effectively as something more than a language to develop CGI programs can make it a pain. There are frameworks like CherryPy and Django, and even Apache modules like mod_wsgi and mod_python exist. However, for the Web, PHP is still the default as far as being free and easy to install, never mind the ease of use. Python's syntax is also rather unique, including the fact that white space is significant. Consider the following PHP bit:
if ($my_var == 'string')
if ($my_second_var == 'another string')
echo 'Do something.'
else
echo 'Do something else.'

Does the else statement belong to the first or the second if statement? White space doesn't matter in PHP, a trait that many C-like languages carried over from C, and this issue is the result of that. Now consider Python that has the same intent:
if my_var == 'string':
if my_second_var = 'another string':
print('Do something.')
else:
print('Do something else.')

With Python, the intent is clear because of the white space. In PHP, the same intent would require braces around the inner if statement:
if ($my_var == 'string')
{
if ($my_second_var == 'another string')
echo 'Do something.'
}
else
echo 'Do something else.'

See how cool things in Python are? ^_^

I can't really say much about the others that scragar didn't explain, and because I don't have any idea of what they are really, I won't talk about them either.

[toicontien]

All though since white space is crucial and important, if you mess up the indentation of your code, you have absolutely NO reference point to where a block of code belongs. With C-like languages that use { and } to denote a block of code, you won't have this problem.

Try asking this question in the .NET forum. You'll get more info, except for maybe Python.