RE: Languages VB and the real world[OT]

-----Original Message-----
From:   Plunkett, Dennis [SMTP:dplunkett@AIRINTER.COM.AU]
Sent:   Thursday, April 20, 2000 7:42 AM
To:     PICLIST@MITVMA.MIT.EDU
Subject:        Re: Languages VB and the real world[OT]

        Winge bitch winge and bitch.
        It has been with great remourse and the deepest sorrow that I have
been watching this thread, a sigh of deep dissapointment and a grey cloud
now covers the list on seeing the old fashion, mine is bigger and better
than yours rubbish arguments surface. Get a grip on reality as you may drown
in your own evloving excretations of of ozzing human waste.
        Any language that the user is comftable with will get the job done.
ALL languagues have troble in forcing the user to create code rather then to
coble code. Not all languages are portable, even thoes that are have
limitations. You can scan the alphabet from A to Z and all the languages
inbetween, for each one there are the good points and bad points, non of
them have created "Great" programmers, but all languages have created
"Great" disarters.
        As I have pointed out on the list time and time before, time to
market is the greatest g-d of all, failing to meet this even with the
greatest compiler and language will still put you out of a job :)

Smile and get the job doen the best way you know how and with the
tools you have

Dennis

I absolutely agree with this. Visual Basic has it's place, along with with C, Pascal, Asembly, Forth and god knows what else. It's just as easy to write horrendous code in C as it is in VB. Whatever the langauge, the quality of code is purely down the skill and experience of the programmer. As I have said before, Visual Basic is totaly unmatched in certain areas such as it's debug facilitys. Yes. it can be too slow for some operations and yes, it requires rather large runtime dll's, but that dosen't stop it being a usefull tool.

Paul Anderson wrote:

Really, BASIC is a very ugly language - most other languages at
least have some level elegance to them(Perl has regex, C has pointers and
indentation, assembler is logical and simple, python has some neat object
orientation, etc.), but basic, UGH, it's a kluge through and through.

VB from version 5 onwards is also exteremly object orientated. VB also has many C like constructs such as Do loops, a switch-like statement. It also uses pointers in a transparent way.

Visual Basic reinforces this klugery, and tends to discourage actually
THINKING about the code. For example, a friend of mine who recently
learned C had programmed in visual basic for a number of years. He sends
me this program full of if() statements, like so:

     if ((xx == 13) || (xx == 18))
        if ((yy == 2) || (yy == 3) || (yy == 4))
          yn = FALSE;
      if (((xx == 13) || (xx == 15) || (xx == 17)) && (yy == 5))
        yn = FALSE;

This is only saying that your friend was a fairly inexperienced VB programmer as well. In fact a fairly inexperienced programmer period. It's possible to write programs in VB that are absolutely clear and readable. VB also supports the equivalent of structures BTW.

To be honest I don't think VB is much worse than any other RAD tool, such as C++ builder. They are, by definition, designed to get projects up and running as quickly as possible. If that compromises certain areas, such as speed and resource useage, then that's the trade-off you make for the ease of use. Actually I installed C++ builder 4 a couple of days ago, and I was pretty shocked when it had to compile over 100,000 lines for a quick "Hello world" type program!!

Regards

Mike