Platformpreference and young people

Martin is speculating about young developers platform preference. Beeing a young developer at 23 and just two months out of school I can somewhat relate to Martins assumptions. Among most "regular computer geeks" in my school there were virtually none that perferred Microsoft technology. They all wanted java and linux. These were naturally also often some of the best students (although some were just lost). The Norwegian demoscene (scene.org), which is among the most active in the world, is dominated by youth, and java have the majority of votes. It's the "doItFromTheCore" and "the less user friendly the better" mentality.

Additionally there seem to be a tendency among (at least Norwegian) schools to prefer open standards for the curriculum, often argued by the "independent standard" point. In my bachelors degree for example, only 2 weekhours in one semester were spent on .NET while approx 4 weekhours over 6 semesters were spent on java programming. Their argument was that; they did not want to be biased (by teaching with Microsoft tech), that Microsoft Software wasn't secure enough, and of course the financial aspect. I tried to tell them about MSDNAA for the last two years, but that was ignored.

.NET is in my opinion the by-far best enterprise development platform. Our bachelor project was J2EE based and I was annoyed about it's lack of productivity for 4 months. Some of the hard-core linux geeks from school are now slowly turning against .NET. But most of them are clinging as hard as they can to open source and java.