Visual Basic book author gives up the language

Norman Lorrain writes "Bruce McKinney, author of of Hardcore Visual Basic has announced that he's fed up with VB and won't be writing a 3rd edition of his book. The best quote is at the end: "I don't need a language designed by a focus group"."

Comments

My problem with VB

[Matt Kimball]

I tried VB once, setting aside my prejudices about it being inspired by BASIC and only for Windows, and produced by Microsoft. The GUI form builder was sort of neat, but I had been spoiled by the 'pack' style tools of AWT, Tk and GTK+, so I was a bit dissapointed when there was no obvious or easy way to reflow the controls when the window size changes.

I could like with this, I thought. The real problem was that I couldn't find a damn BNF of the language to save my life. The on-line docs didn't help at all, and when I went to my local book superstore, all I could find were books that either like "how to learn programming with VB" or "here is a bunch of man pages on the standard libraries". To this day, I'm still not sure how the syntax of VB really works.

Nevertheless, it *is* nice to drag 'n drop GUI components on a form, and then edit properties of the components with immediate visual feedback. So there's something. But I couldn't figure out how to do any useful computations behind the UI code.

I say give me Tcl or Python or Perl or Lisp as a RAD language anytime over VB. I think it's ironic that I had an easier time learning each of those languages that I had with my attempt at learning VB. Hell, I even think it was easier for me to learn C, C++ and various assembly languages that it was for me to learn VB. They actually had decent documentation.