I’m a fan of Oxygene (and Delphi before it). The company I work for has decided to consult with outside “experts” as to what platform and technologies we should develop for. They are going to recommend C#. I don’t think C# is as clean and easy to write, etc. as Oxygene. I will probably quit if they make this stupid decision. (I know C# but I can’t stand not using what I think is the superior technology)
One of the main arguments that I can’t counter is that there are far more people that know C# and so it is easier to hire people that do C#. I personally think that the CALIBER of people using Pascal is higher than C# (on average) so it wouldn’t bother me that the pool of people to choose from is smaller.
But ARE any places advertising for Oxygene programmers? Are there enough Oxygene programmers out there to say, “No problem finding new programmers?”
One point of note: any C# developer worth his salt should find it really easy to pick up Oxygene, if you ask them to. So i would not focus too much on hiring people who already know and use Oxygene, per se, but I finding good .NET developers who’d be open to explore a new (and better language.
The ability to seamlessly mix Oxygene with C# code will a,so come in helpful in this case. It’s always possible to fall back to using C# for a single class in a project — say because you found one online and want to just paste in, or because you think C# will work better for a certain task.
For example, the side project I’m working on right now is all Swift, .NET server and iOS/Andtoid client app. But one (partial, even) class I C#, because I needed to do something that wasn’t as easy in Swift (in this case, use unsafe code to manipulate a bitmap, which we don’t currently expose in Swift. I could have picked Oxygene too, not sure why I didn’t ;).
Those are arguments I make too, to no avail. So do you know if there are a lot of Oxygene programmers out there, or how to find them if we wanted to hire them? (I’m a programmer, I don’t usually concern myself with personnel issues so don’t know how to find ANY language person for hire )
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