Which language would you chose between C# and PHP

[Aeikus]

I'm interested in changing career paths from computer repair and troubleshooting to programming. The two languages I'm looking at are C# and PHP. I understand the two are apples and oranges in comparison because they are for two entirely different things. However, I would like to learn a language that is in high demand and could give me a good level of job security. So based on your knowledge and experience, which of these two would you think could provide that? I appreciate any feed back you can provide.

Thanks! :D

[tom4343]

personally i feel C#

[Xerax]

Been coding websites in PHP for about a year and a half. For a new company I set up I decided to use ASP (C#), because the website will have to manage larges about of data crunching (game stats and the like). And I have to say, the entire development experience has been better. The debugging, the designing, the structuring.. I built a site in 2 days that would of taken be a week in PHP.

[threetonesun]

PHP is an odd duck, but it's still (usually) the P part of LAMP, so there are plenty of jobs out there for it. If you're going to start with a project that is already written in a language, I'd learn Python + Django instead of PHP if web development strikes your fancy. Python is extremely easy to learn, and outside of it's sometimes annoying whitespacing, is usually the most logical for a learner.

[Eric Veteran]

C#... can't abide by PHP...

[CentralDogma]

Aeikus, you shouldn't pigeonhole yourself into just one language. It's OK to concentrate on one language while learning to see examples of programming concepts and to do some hands on learning, but you want to learn the fundamentals that will be language agnostic. I've covered this on my blog.

[The_Decryptor Veteran]

...

that guy who wrote the article knows nothing and he then gave loads of arguments which he tried to justify why PHP is not needed or is used and It was just a load of hog

The article raises a ton of good points and provides a bunch of examples, I don't see how you can just reject them out of hand.

	function foo(string $s) {}

	foo("hello world");

Why should that cause a fatal error for example? And such a nonsensical error at that.

Catchable fatal error: Argument 1 passed to foo() must be an instance of string, string given, called in ? on line 3 and defined in ? on line 2

[jamieakers]

C#

[Sebass]

Neither, all of them or any of them.

You said you are coming from a computer repair background and want to learn a programming language.

Without further info I assume you are just beggining so just pick one and learn the fundamentals first.

So you better start hacking. Programming is more like an art and there are millions ways to solve a problem some solutions better/elegant/etc than others and the only way to get there is to program and keep progamming, make lots mistakes and learn from them.

I would start with procedural programing to get the basic stuff first and then move to object oriented programming. The core concepts are the same for all common programming languages.

Many programming languages do better in specific fields than others such as web, desktop, mobile, scripiting, etc. There is no jack for all trades in my opinion.

Don't get confused when comparing programming languages and frameworks, django, ruby on rails, .net, etc are all frameworks so these frameworks should be compared to Zend, Codeigniter and other PHP frameworks.

I wouldn't recommend to start learning a language using a framework since frameworks usually have a certain pattern to follow and need to follow a certain way to do things which imho should be avoided when first learning a programming language.

To give you an example at school on my first year we started learning the basic stuff on Pascal which you can consider now a dead language but the basic principles have remain over the years and will probably not change anytime soon.

Now my personal preferences:

For web development I choose PHP for many other things which are not related to the language itself, such as documentation, code examples, big community, it's free, works on every platform, lots of tested code out there (lots of bad code as well :-)

On Linux enviroments for quick scripting I prefer python over perl.

For other type of work C# and Java are really popular, Java more than C# specially on big projects that I've been involved to. Java also has the android as a platform which is a big plus for the language.

Don't forget Objective-C for Apple devices lots of opportunities there especially since the mobile/tablet market is growing expentionally every year.

Anyway I envy you nothing is so exciting like learning a new thing from the first time especially programming and remember start coding from day zero. Don't waste time reading entire books before starting, you will only get better and better by coding.

One last thing If you know friends that are also into programming try to do things togheter. It is the most fun thing to do and you will learn a lot that from each other. Plus usually when you do programming for a living it involves working with other people which takes progamming to a different level since it is not just you reading and working on your code.

Cheers.