Technology Migration

A thread on this forum I started brought about a lot of specialists together all *agitating* (pardon me if I used the wrong word) for people to migrate to their platform. Same with a lot of poeple I meet on th Streets.

**leave VB, come to Java**
**forget ASP, PHP is the future**
**why are you still using VB, switch to .NET**

and so many similar statements, but one thing most of them never mention or discuss is the fact that it takes a lot for people who have spent years in a technology to migrate to another. Can you imagine telling a VB programmer since 1999 to wake up in 2006 and start all over with java. Its not that simple, is it?

I can switch to some programs easiliy, maybe not Java, but a lot of people find it extrememly difficult. using a technology is not just typing codes, it is a culture,

I hope you see the pattern. VB, ASP both microsoft (pffft). VB pretty much is a copy of java.
ASP lets not even start. At the end of the day, forget technology, think of the factors that come into software engineering and then the "right" technology will come to play.

Multi-platform or not?
Cost of development?
Cost of future maintenance?
Security?

Etc etc etc,

Netbeans Free, PHP free (Ruby on Rails rocks free too). Its like saying people who programmed in fortran should stick with it because its not easy to migrate.
Explains why I know 11 languages but focus on C/C++ mostly

Because IMO most current languages are an "improved" C/C++, ANSI C amongs all current languages gives you the most basic functions to achieve anything. Most languages have additional functions to make life easier. If you can handle C/C++ and the software engineering, it should be fairly straight forward picking any other language up.

Like Java is a better cleaner C++ if you see what I mean.

PHP is C for the newbie web developer, but is also very powerful.

I think that often too much focus is given to the programming language rather than the technology and/or concepts involved. For example, I believe that the main difficulty a programmer will face when moving from VB to java is not the java syntax but rather fully understanding the concept of OOP (Object Oriented Programming), structured exception handling etc. Once the fundamentals of OOP are understood, then moving to any other OOP based programming language is not such a quantum leap.

I find that the main reason for moving to a different language and/or platform is to be able to exploit the new technology provided and whilst it's no doubt a daunting task, I think that all good developers should try and have an open mind about this.

sbucareer, thanks for expanding on my post and I take your point that VB is a construct of OOP however I feel it has some limitations compared to a fully fledged OOP language such as java, C++ etc. Having said that, I haven't studied VB.NET in detail however I suspect some of the previous limitations have probably now been addressed.