java vs .net

One is a language (and some APIs) and the other is a platform specification.

It's like comparing a car you drive to work with the road you take to work.
The question seems meaningless to me.

Neither depends on the other for their continued success (or otherwise). You're free to use one without giving a hoot about the other.

> which is more popular and superior
For those old enough to remember, VHS was popular, and Betamax was superior.
Both are now dead - that's technological evolution for you.

Remember that when deciding what to nail your colours to at the beginning of your career. Because it's very unlikely you'll be using the same at the end of your career 50-odd years from now.

I'm sorry but which one is a language and which is a platform.I thought both were independent programing languages .
Can you elaborate on my mistake.

Well you have
VB.Net, VC++.Net etc etc
Right?

To tell you somethings to start off : firstly you are not the first person and certainly not the last one to be bruding over this question. Secondly this question can be satisfactorily answered by a person having enough expertise and expierience in both of the langauges in question, I doubt you would find many of them here, or anywhere else for that matter. Moreover I feel that such questions can be answered more appropriately by the concerned person himself. Having said this, I just provide you with points where you can start thinking over and comparing these two platforms.
When it comes to questions such as, "which langauge is superior over other", there is never a definite or generic answer. The answer can be different for different situations and mostly lies in the need of the use. What you want to achieve and how you want to achieve that, would be two questions that would take you closest to the answer. To site you an example, there is always a debate (over Java vs C/C++) in the making when in our organisation we are faced with the situation of developing projects/applications/modules. Being a java developer predominantly my first call is always for Java, but also being acquainted in C/C++ and a lover of these languages is what sparks a dilemma in my mind. Till recently we would certainly have answered the issue this way : If the application/module was supposed to performance critical, speed critical we would have tilted in the favour of C/C++ since code written in Java langauge can never achieve native speed. But articles such as this may surprise us enough to turn our favour. If platform independence was an issue, anyone would prefer Java, but then there are organisations such as Boost that are developing libraries that would be usable across a wide variety of platforms. There are advantages and disadvantages for any langauge, for e.g. being freely available, platform independent, auto memory management, amply available resources, help and tutorials and fast development etc advantages would work in favour of java whereas speed, performance and the flexibility of C/C++ to be able to do all sorts of applications would be the advantages that work in favour of C/C++. Some of these advantages might even be overlapping as much as the disadvantages such as programs written in java too can be performance oriented if written well, as well as resources and tutorials for C/C++ can be found quite easily.
To sum up by opinion here I would like to say that no langauge is all good or all bad and while selecting (or rejecting) a langauge for a project all these things (and probably many more) should be properly weighed and the correct one to be chosen appropriately. In many cases for the same situation the langauge of choise can be different for different individuals depending on their favourism and expertise. I hope this is helpful to you and pushes you in a positive way towards your decision.

PS : Excuse my lack of usage of .NET platform in examples, since my knowledge resources on that is quite shallow, the aim here is to provide a ground for comaprison of any two langauges.

thanks a ton...that helped a lot

If that solves the question in your mind, and you do not have any further questions related to this, mark this thread as solved.