"most" is a pretty big assumption. The church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster is really picking up in the polls.

And apparently my kid's email address is linked to one of the id's in that link. Please don't spam him. He's three, and kind of an asshole, so he'll probably sue.

Here's the target URL for the "reply" link in the email: http://www.facebook.com/r.php?re=****874bfa5f26e09fced837c7f9b919&mid=HMTEyMjUwMTMxOnd5YXR0LmxpdmVseUBnbWFpbC5jb206NzA&key=AQBFYIZEyzDLc5PJyg9-7_q9ZqzSb28o8cj_7HUwqfQGV0vVL26v96RXQF58scxN3mIJ5RYtaclTbOA8&invid=18808833 (asterisks inserted to protect laughable expectation of privacy) I'm surprised, as I didnt think they did it, either. Seems *way* to sketchy for a publically-traded (ha!) company.

I disagree. I took my first programming class at age 7 (pilot gifted/talented/arrogant/pretentious program) on an Apple 2E. After ~30 years, I can say my career doesn't suck, and it's a good thing I had a marketable job skill when high school got boring. That said: I'm not sure my 3 year old will be ready for BASIC in four years, but that's probably what my dad would have said about me. I've found that when you raise your expectations, kids tend to meet them with suprising speed and competence.

What a lot of people seem to be missing is that the HTML5/JS crap is for UI - it isn't, and can't be, used for real app development. Just as with conventional web development, where the UI has to be based in HTML and JavaScript (which, we all know, we use because we have to, not because it's a good platform), your server-side language of choice is still doing the real work. Even in the exceedingly unlikely event that Winforms and WPF are depracated, .NET is still going to be the real workhorse of any application that's not built in C++. .NET is embedded in the industry as a whole - the vast majority of Windows software is built in a .NET language these days, and the vast majority of software written is for Windows. Even Microsoft's products rely heavily upon the framework - for instance, the entire VS2010 UI is WPF. This reminds me of the guy I sat in a meeting with two years ago who claimed that using stored procedures was stupid because MS was removing support from SQL Server. Yeah - not bloody likely. Gotta love the trolls.

Last time I checked, Microsoft provided some pretty slick, very full-featured Express versions of all of the Visual Studio tools - specifically, C#. Mono is also a viable option for Linux fanboys who disregard anything that comes out of Redmond on some misguided and impractical principle. Nevertheless, poor science. I love C# and it helps me to produce very reliable code. I choose to spend my weekends with friends and family - a concern that a lot of younger, less experienced developers don't have.