RockinRoel

Can you guys just react to each other's arguments without throwing in insults? Isn't asking for 90% kind of revealing of your own opinion on the matter, Linus? Personally, I feel like booth babes are kind of dumb. It's a pretty cheap way of grabbing attention, in my opinion, but then again, I loathe most marketing tactics. Post it if you must, I guess, maybe you'll find a way to make it interesting in some way.

That's peculiar. What makes DirectX give better results? That's the first time I ever heard of it. I think a large issue with OpenGL is that it's easier to find good learning resources for modern Direct3D, but it's more difficult for OpenGL. I still stumble upon very old-fashioned OpenGL tutorials quite often. In the end, the principles are very similar, as the hardware is of course the same, they just have their own quirks. OpenGL has a very wide applicability when compared to Direct3D and it's become a more viable option nowadays, so if you can find good resources, then I'd say learn OpenGL.

For Java/Scala: Eclipse (using the Scala IDE extension) For C++: KDevelop For most other stuff: Vim For C#: Visual Studio, but only because there are no real alternatives, I think Eclipse is a way better IDE for Java than Visual Studio is for C#

In case you are wondering why you get a NullPointerException: you are trying to pop from an empty stack for some reason. That should not happen, of course. Another thing: your implementation of the generic stack class is not right. You're calling your generic type "Integer" (hiding java.lang.Integer) and not using it anywhere. Best of luck.

I'm not out of university yet, but I have had student jobs as a programmer and I know a few people who have started working. Don't worry too much about your first day. You'll probably feel useless because you still have to get into the swing of it. Your employer knows that and he probably won't mind. No one really accomplishes anything on their first day, you'll just spend a lot of time getting set up and figuring stuff out. There will usually be a bunch of more experienced colleagues who will guide you through it. If you feel like you're the brightest bulb in the box when you're just starting out, then unless you are truly a genius, that's a bad sign, because it means that you'll have to rely on yourself to gain experience. You're not likely to start out on a brand new project from scratch. You're unlikely to be in charge of a new project, unless it's like a really small internal tool. Again, if you feel like you're immediately in charge of the advanced thing in the shop, that's probably a bad sign. A lot of software development is maintenance of existing software, so you're likely to start out implementing simple features or fixing bugs. Also, most software companies don't write software like Microsoft Word. Most of them write pretty niche software that you probably never heard of, and a lot of them don't just sell a boxed piece of software, but make most of their money from service contracts. There are even a lot of companies who only work on software they use internally, where the success of the software is based on the increase of productivity, instead of their sales. A lot of software is based on web technologies these days, too. Anyway, you know 2 languages and you've dabbled in a bunch of other languages, which already puts you in a pretty good position. I know a lot of people who start out only really knowing one programming language. You don't want to be that guy. Always broaden your horizon. Always be prepared to learn, a lot. A huge part of software development is just learning new things.

You don't need a .edu e-mail address to get on Dreamspark. As a Belgian student, I just used my (.be) university e-mail address and it worked fine. If your educational institution is registered with Dreamspark and you have an e-mail address, then it should just work. Also, for the Express edition, I think you can just enter whatever in the company field and it will let you through. Other than that, Qt and Eclipse have been mentioned before. There's no need to use Visual Studio. I don't have a tonne of experience with QtCreator, but I've used Eclipse before and it works just fine. Their servers seem to be unreachable at the moment, but when they go back up, look for Eclipse CDT (C/C++ Development Tooling). You should just be able to download Eclipse with CDT all in one and get started with C++ right away.

It's hard to say what my favorite programming language is, because you obviously have to use the right tool for the right job. The language that excites me the most is Scala. It's a lesser known programming language that runs on the JVM (Java Virtual Machine), but has tons of neat features that make it a lot nicer than Java, and it's rapidly gaining steam. It's being used by companies like Twitter and LinkedIn. When's the last time you've seen the fail whale? Been a while, hasn't it? Part of the reason why it disappeared was that Twitter switched their backend to Scala. But of course, not one size fits all, so for more low-level programming or more performance-critical or real-time applications, e.g. video games, I really like C++. With the new C++11 standard a lot of really neat features have been added and a lot of nuisances have been removed. It supposedly feels like a whole new language now, but I wouldn't know, because I started using C++ in 2011. I'd really like to see the kind of control that C++ offers in other, more high-level programming languages. Resource management can be really elegant in C++ in comparison to most other programming languages. I tried to implement good resource management in C# once, but I was longing for C++ the entire time.

VB.NET uses the .NET framework, so it'll work with any code written in C#, and any code written in C# works with VB.NET. I never used it myself (I did use VB6 when I was a kid), but it's supposed to be a beginner's programming language. I'm not too sure about that because the code samples I see actually confuse the hell out of me. As for serious programming, nobody actually uses VB.NET. Plenty of people use Java, though, and it's definitely worth learning, so if there's no other way you can get to learn Java, go for it. If you can learn Java without learning VB.NET, just don't bother with it. Nobody in the industry does.