Although Pascal was my first love, Java is in many ways the best programming language I know.

Michael Kay, the author of the best Java XSLT processor (Saxon) and a large part of the XSLT specification, also wrote the best books on the subject. Very accessible, very precise, very thorough.

XML didn't live up to its expectations, but I still like it.

After the initial excitement wore off, I feel that Scala is not as huge an improvement over Java as it's made out to be (especially since Java 8 introduced lambdas), and Scala has a few disadvantages: compilation often takes much longer and is less incremental, and some language features can actually lead to reduced code quality.

I once had to work with Zope and didn't like it, but Python was love at first sight. I never had an opportunity to build large Python applications though.

MySQL was the first SQL database I worked with, and it's still my favorite, although I also enjoyed working with PostgreSQL and Derby. Oracle is an old-fashioned (but powerful) monster.

As far as building apps is concerned, I prefer Android to iOS, mostly because I prefer Java to Objective-C and Swift.

Git is fast, robust and simple. If you're coming from server-based versioning systems, you may need to somewhat change your thinking though.

Want to learn how to build super-clean and well-designed Java frameworks? Read Spring source code. Best code base of all open-source projects.

SOAP is never simple, rarely about objects, and doesn't provide access. It's not great as a protocol and even worse as an acronym. I debugged and maintained SOAP interfaces for dozens of large financial institutions and want to help the unfortunate souls who have not yet migrated to JSON. ;-)

In many ways (syntax, hardware model), C is the root of almost all current languages. C is used everywhere, from low-level stuff like device drivers to rather high-level things like the Ruby interpreter.

I used Java for about 15 years and learned C++ in the last two years. It's interesting and refreshing to see how these languages that may seem similar at first sight (syntax, object-orientation, templates/generics, ...) are actually based on quite different philosophies / goals.

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Christopher S.

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