Google Trends allows you to compare the popularity of various search terms. A friend pointed me at this, having put Java into it and noted a "dropping trend". I played around with it for a while, sticking in various language names, and came away with more questions than answers.

How to write stupid conclusions

The obvious but stupid way to write a blog post based upon Google trends would be to look at the graph for Java, look at the graph for Lua (a recent scripting language suited to embedding) and spurt out things like, "OMGWTFBBQ LOOK! Java is getting less popular and Lua is getting more popular!". Let's look more carefully at this, though.

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Recently, a friend mentioned that someone had told him that writing a try...catch block in C# (or substitute some other .Net language here) resulted in a "huge penalty" in terms of performance compared to if you had not written it. That is, merely writing such a block actually hurt program performance, even if an exception was never thrown. He didn't believe this was true, and rightly so - it's completely wrong. This post is a tidied up version of my explanation.

Inside a .Net Assembly

A .Net assembly, if we ignore various headers, consists of three things:

• Bytecode: a sequence of low-level instructions that specify the body of a method
• Metadata: a set of tables, a little bit like a database, describing higher level constructs such as classes, methods, signatures and so forth
• Heaps: places where string constants and other such things are stored

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We get a lot of emails from Programmer's Heaven users. Amongst the requests that we do people's homework, which we ignore, we also get some more interesting questions sent to us too. We figured that when we do, we may as well share our answers more widely, and also this gives other folks a chance to give their input too. Recently we got one from someone who had discovered us through the C# School e-book and asked, "please kindly advise which of the two, C# and VB .NET is better for developing commercial applications like Payroll".

The Similarities

Both languages run in the Common Language Runtime and allow you to have full access to the .Net Class Library. This means that pretty much whatever is in the .Net Class Library is equally available to both VB.NET and C#.NET. Both languages have a similar feature set too, providing strong support for Object Oriented Programming, which is good for developing database-backed applications, as your Payroll surely will be.

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REST is short for Representational State Transfer. I'd place that into the category of names that makes more sense once you understand what REST is, but isn't quite so helpful in terms of explaining it. REST is often heard in the context of web services. When it was suggested as a topic for me to write about it was described to me as a web service but doing "the query string thing" to pass it parameters. That's not really what it's about, though.

Verbs and nouns

Verbs are doing words. Examples in natural language are "pay", "drink" and "shock". In most programming paradigms, we spend a lot of time defining how to do things, by writing methods, subroutines or functions. These are our programming equivalent of verbs.

Nouns represent entities. Examples in natural language are "money", "beer" and "mother". Whenever we have data in our program and we somehow identify it (for example, by name binding or variable declaration), these are just like nouns in natural language.

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