Haha, in University, on a project with a friend, we ended up re-writing cpp (the C-compiler preprocessor) in Prolog. We got an A- and "I'm not sure why you'd do this … " on the project.
The biggest lesson I've learned from various startups is that "all-in-it-together" is an awful lot like asking "How are you?" (The correct answer is "Fine!", even if your arm just got torn off, your cat died, and your spouse left you for a monkey): It's conversation, and nothing more.
In the end, everybody is unpredictable. If you don't protect your rights from the start, you'll have problems. Even (especially?) if you're BFFs, everything should be spelled out in advance, including metrics for conceptual terms such as "success", etc.
Adylitica is hiring software development interns for iOS, web apps, WP7, or Android development. We do contract and boutique mobile app development.
We're based in Beijing, and will help you take care of everything you need to come out and work with us. It's a super fun city with tonnes to do and great food to boot.
Our website's pretty bland, but feel free to get in touch with us:
"Popular" here is going to mean maybe 15% market share, if my memory serves correctly. Popular server languages remain Java, PHP, ASP.NET, and increasingly Ruby.
In my mind, the reality is that you should choose the programming language based on the skills of you or your programmer(s) and the task at hand. If I were going to implement a banking system, I'd probably look first at Java and its J2EE libraries to see what options were available there. I've used PHP recently (despite it being a reasonably painful language) because it has some wonderful productivity and scalability features that we've been able to really take advantage of.
However, I've nothing against any of the other platforms (with the exception of a slight bias away from anything that requires me running windows servers), and have been fiddling with Ruby, and also exploring Haskell, Erland, Clojure, and even Scala.
Unless we're talking in-house applications using VB or C#, or mobile phone applications using ObjC or Java, "client-side" almost always means HTML/CSS/JS these days.
So, look at the task and the talent, and go from there. Most of the common platforms that you've heard of are all going to have large enough communities for support and libraries to perform various non-standard tasks.
This. I find it is frequently accompanied by a non-trivial degree of condescension and complete and utter lack of understanding about how what they're trying to build would actually work.
This. This remains the most concise and to-the-point programming book I have -ever- read. It bothers me some that people (myself included) keep writing 900 page programming books when this can do nearly the same in 200.
Once you're done with that, pick up one of the W. Richard Stevens (RIP) books — Advanced Programming in the Unix environment, or Unix Network Programming (Vol i/ii) if you're into networks. They'll teach you the basics of so much operating system stuff (it'll be Unix, but the core concepts will apply to any modern OS) you'll be growing a long unkempt beard and wearing sandals/suspenders in no time.
Let me be the first to jump in here and express a certain degree of uncertainty with what the author has written.
While it does seem to be that, in Western societies, the societal pressure to cooperate and reciprocate would encourage people to keep playing, in Asian cultures (read: China), games like FV are based less on cooperation than on "sticking it" to other people.
The local version of FarmVille here is called "Stealing Vegetables" by pretty much everybody who plays it, and you get ahead by sabotaging or stealing your neighbours' vegetables in addition to growing and protecting yours. Kitchen games involve sabotaging ingredients, parking games stealing spots, and so on.
Indeed, a group of us were playing an iPhone game similar to FV called "We Rule", and while it was interesting for the first couple of days, it became so mind-numbingly dull that even the risk of annoying our friends couldn't keep us on the game. Cooperation only motivates so far.
So, while the author has (in a very long and winding way) hit on some interesting points about these games, I think there's still something else at work. My current inclinations all lie in how simple tasks give rewards immediately (see 4square "hey you logged in, get a badge!" or stack overflow "You posted! here's badge!"). By constantly adding new things (WoW even spends lots of energy adding in new mounts, quests, and whatnot) you keep that reward loop active and keep me hoping for more.
I did a DVD training series for PHPTR and we used Snapz Pro X. Works really well, and supports a lot of crap that perfeshunnal video people seem to understand (I just did what I was told).
Have a lot of friends and family in Asia, and too many answers are "dunno, sorry".