In VB.NET, you have Try...Catch syntax; the DIM statement has been changed to work how you want it to, the set statement has been removed from the language.
Even so, these are hardly earth-shattering things that are wrong with the language - simply syntactical annoyances that might trip you up once or twice until you get used to them.
If you really wanted to talk about the shortcomings of VB6, you should raise the lack of object constructors, circular references between objects causing undestroyable objects (and therefore memory leaks), etc.
If people really wanted to make a case against BASIC in all its forms, they should be attacking the core aspects of the language - for example, the design decision to hide pointers from the programmer and the active discouragement of directly accessing memory.
Try converting a big-endian integer to a little-endian integer in Visual Basic for example. What should be a simple memory operation (maybe four lines of assembler?) becomes a relatively difficult task (probably involving boolean and mathematical functions).
Why? Because although the C or ASM code will be smaller and quicker, it will risk corrupting memory, which VB tries to avoid at all costs.
(Old timers will note that the old ANSI BASIC commands PEEK and POKE could have covered this gap, but M$ has got rid of these and other memory access keywords like VARPTR)
THAT sort of argument could be made, and I would be happy to argue against it, but that is not what is happening. Every new version of BASIC has *DIFFERENT* criticisms against it, in a way that no other language AFAIK must suffer.
I suspect that there are also people that start coding in BASIC, switch to a lower level language like C, then heap shit on BASIC to establish that they are no longer "beginners".
I've been programming in BASIC for around 15 years. I don't know why, but during that whole 15 years BASIC has copped flak.
The reasons have changed over the years. Originally, the complaints were that it didn't have variable declarations and encouraged "spaghetti code" through the GOTO command. Variable declarations were added, and SUBs/Functions and even classes/objects were added to the language.
Then there was a complaint that you couldn't make "true executables", so M$ added that option.
Then the complaints were about its lack of providing object inheritance. Now we have that. But the flames continue.
Why?
It's clear that the flames are not due to any particular aspect of the language, since the arguments have changed over time. And so has the language. I can tell you that modern BASIC has almost nothing in common with the original ANSI BASIC except for a few legacy keywords (FOR..NEXT, GOTO, DIM etc). Modern object-oriented computer languages are so similar that I have more than once been reading a bit of code in a magazine article and only realised half way through that it was a different language from VB.
I wonder if other languages get as persistently flamed. I believe the real reason is due to the language's very name: BASIC. I suspect that if the language was instead called "Visual Complex.NET", all of this flaming of the language would cease.
I'm not saying that City of Heroes is addictive at all, but prior to buying it, my wife used to call the computer my "mistress". Now she calls it "THAT SLUT!!!!!"
All of the boys are currently having problems with the SO's about CoH. Except the one lucky b*stard whose fiancee plays more than he does.
We might have to resort to a scheduled "CoH night" or something.
The article describes the billboard as "...an innovation by a New York-based display technology company whose name, Magink, is a combination of the words magic and ink."
Lucky they mentioned that. At first I thought the name was a combination of the words "Ma" and "Gink".
Instead of saying "no", try telling this to the customer/boss/whoever:
"Think of a number, any number and write it down here. Now keep adding zeroes to the right hand side. When I say 'Stop', that's how much it will cost you for me to do that for you.":-)
As a BASIC programmer from way back, I relish the opportunity of someone else being kicked around for not coding in a "real" language:-)
Face it, with modern languages, no one is a "real" coder any more. There are probably sixteen guys in the world that can manually convert their source code into binary executable. THESE guys are the real coders, since they actually can optimise their code in terms of processor ops.
Perhaps we're looking at the problem incorrectly. We should look at ways of making spam MORE effective, not less. It is in everyone's interest (including the spammers) to make tools that "target" spam more effectively.
The problem is not so much unsolicited mail, but rather unwanted mail. An email from a long lost friend who happens to find your email address on a website is unsolicited, but certainly not unwanted. Similarly if I'm in the market for 3D goggles, and I receive an email from a company selling same, than that email is not unwanted.
Why would spammers ever want to more effectively target their "victims", when the cost of sending millions of emails is negligible? Simple. Trust. At the moment, I would not reply to a spam email selling a product I was interested in, simply because I see so many get-rich-quick spams that I wouldn't trust the spammer to give me anything for my money.
Has anyone considered what would happen if Windows did become open source? How would this affect Linux? Would a significant proportion of Linux programmers "jump ship" to "Open Windows"?
I can certainly see new Open Source programmers starting on Windows, and never even trying out Linux.
OTOH, perhaps it would simply be a "bigger pie"... Open Source Windows = more Open Source coders?
[N.B. This is pure uninformed speculation based on my personal experiences]
I found that when I started working full time as a programmer, my shortsightedness started getting worse very quickly.
I reframed an old pair of (weaker) spectacles to use with the computer i.e. made some "reading glasses" (although, being -8.0 in both eyes meant that these were also short-sightedness spectacles; I can't read without my specs and I'm SHORT-sighted!)
My eyesight has stabilised and improved a little bit since doing this.
My theory is that our eyes evolved by looking at far away things, and that they're not suited to staring at an object only a meter away all day.
..that with America's refusal to switch to the metric system that they ever managed to land on the moon.
Biggest evidence that they faked the landing, IMHO.
Don't worry, you won't have to eat "113.4g burgers with cheese" - we still have Quarter Pounders here in Australia - "we just don't know what the *&%# a quarter pounder is" (sure isn't 100% beef like the wrapping says).
Well, isn't it? I remember C64's being a funny grey-brown colour. Of course, the screen colours were quite nice - light blue on dark blue.
I remember upgrading from my VIC 20 to the C64. The first game I loaded was called "International Soccer". It took about twenty minutes to load of the cassette drive, but boy was it worth it.
I was stunned - it showed the players in an *oblique angle*!!! None of this "viewed from the top" or "viewed from the side" stuff.
Better still, they were *animated*!!! Can you believe it?!
Someone should set up an "Anti-Patent" website. A place where people can submit ideas, algorithms etc that they DON'T want to see patented - basically, a formal way of establishing the public domain.
A trust-worthy date stamp on each "anti-patent" would establish what was "prior art" and what was not.
Whereas broad patents are difficult to get accepted, broad "anti-patents" would be accepted easily.
This would make it easier for the patent guys (and defendents) to determine what was "prior art" and what was not.
Here's an idea I've been mulling over for a way to enforce shareware "unlocking".
First, you only accept credit cards as payment.
Then, you have a registration key that uses only works for the combination of credit card number + name on the credit card + card expiry date.
Of course, you only issue the registration number when the credit card transaction is accepted.
Now here's the sneaky bit: you display the credit card details on the startup splash screen of the registered product.
This way, if they give a copy of the registered program to their friends, they are compromising the secrecy of their credit card number.
It's not foolproof (won't stop stolen cards or hacking the program with an assembler), but it might work well against casual piracy.
For companies that purchase your program, you might use the company name + company registration number - this is not as good, so you would charge a higher "company rate" for the product (which includes a site license, so you don't have to worry about a single-user license being copied within the same company).
The problem with piracy, as I see it, is not the technical aspect of protection, but the lack of penalty if you do so.
Even scarier would be virii embedded in discussion board websites. Say for example, I embedded an HTML virus in this reply! (I haven't:-). I'm pretty sure most discussion boards filter out HTML.. but the readers are taking it on trust.
Also, what a new browser comes out supporting new HTML tags? If the web server is older than the browser you are using, those new tags may not be recognised by the web site as valid HTML... and therefore not filtered.
The best way to protect your kids from the internet? Simple. Put the computer in the lounge room, or wherever your TV is, with the monitor facing wherever you usually sit. I guarantee it's much better censorship that any sort of proxy or "safe surfing" software.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, these have all been addressed in VB.NET
In VB.NET, you have Try...Catch syntax; the DIM statement has been changed to work how you want it to, the set statement has been removed from the language.
Even so, these are hardly earth-shattering things that are wrong with the language - simply syntactical annoyances that might trip you up once or twice until you get used to them.
If you really wanted to talk about the shortcomings of VB6, you should raise the lack of object constructors, circular references between objects causing undestroyable objects (and therefore memory leaks), etc.
If people really wanted to make a case against BASIC in all its forms, they should be attacking the core aspects of the language - for example, the design decision to hide pointers from the programmer and the active discouragement of directly accessing memory.
Try converting a big-endian integer to a little-endian integer in Visual Basic for example. What should be a simple memory operation (maybe four lines of assembler?) becomes a relatively difficult task (probably involving boolean and mathematical functions).
Why? Because although the C or ASM code will be smaller and quicker, it will risk corrupting memory, which VB tries to avoid at all costs.
(Old timers will note that the old ANSI BASIC commands PEEK and POKE could have covered this gap, but M$ has got rid of these and other memory access keywords like VARPTR)
THAT sort of argument could be made, and I would be happy to argue against it, but that is not what is happening. Every new version of BASIC has *DIFFERENT* criticisms against it, in a way that no other language AFAIK must suffer.
I suspect that there are also people that start coding in BASIC, switch to a lower level language like C, then heap shit on BASIC to establish that they are no longer "beginners".
I've been programming in BASIC for around 15 years. I don't know why, but during that whole 15 years BASIC has copped flak.
The reasons have changed over the years. Originally, the complaints were that it didn't have variable declarations and encouraged "spaghetti code" through the GOTO command. Variable declarations were added, and SUBs/Functions and even classes/objects were added to the language.
Then there was a complaint that you couldn't make "true executables", so M$ added that option.
Then the complaints were about its lack of providing object inheritance. Now we have that. But the flames continue.
Why?
It's clear that the flames are not due to any particular aspect of the language, since the arguments have changed over time. And so has the language. I can tell you that modern BASIC has almost nothing in common with the original ANSI BASIC except for a few legacy keywords (FOR..NEXT, GOTO, DIM etc). Modern object-oriented computer languages are so similar that I have more than once been reading a bit of code in a magazine article and only realised half way through that it was a different language from VB.
I wonder if other languages get as persistently flamed. I believe the real reason is due to the language's very name: BASIC. I suspect that if the language was instead called "Visual Complex.NET", all of this flaming of the language would cease.
I'm not saying that City of Heroes is addictive at all, but prior to buying it, my wife used to call the computer my "mistress". Now she calls it "THAT SLUT!!!!!"
All of the boys are currently having problems with the SO's about CoH. Except the one lucky b*stard whose fiancee plays more than he does.
We might have to resort to a scheduled "CoH night" or something.
The article describes the billboard as "...an innovation by a New York-based display technology company whose name, Magink, is a combination of the words magic and ink."
Lucky they mentioned that. At first I thought the name was a combination of the words "Ma" and "Gink".
TYFYA,
--#>SurturZ
Instead of saying "no", try telling this to the customer/boss/whoever:
:-)
"Think of a number, any number and write it down here. Now keep adding zeroes to the right hand side. When I say 'Stop', that's how much it will cost you for me to do that for you."
-SurturZ
I was wondering what that great big red dot in the sky was.
Oh wait, I'm hung over.
Yesterday, I put it on the car CD player and accidentally ran down a moped and three pedestrians before I realised I wasn't playing the game.
As a BASIC programmer from way back, I relish the opportunity of someone else being kicked around for not coding in a "real" language :-)
Face it, with modern languages, no one is a "real" coder any more. There are probably sixteen guys in the world that can manually convert their source code into binary executable.
THESE guys are the real coders, since they actually can optimise their code in terms of processor ops.
Bah! Making black coffee taste like it has milk in it is nothing. When they make TCP/IP flavoured coffee, then I'll be impressed.
...my preciousssss.......!
If it's released in late February, I'm betting the NASDAQ will be down in March.
Sell shares! Buy MOO3!
-SurturZ
Perhaps we're looking at the problem incorrectly. We should look at ways of making spam MORE effective, not less. It is in everyone's interest (including the spammers) to make tools that "target" spam more effectively.
The problem is not so much unsolicited mail, but rather unwanted mail. An email from a long lost friend who happens to find your email address on a website is unsolicited, but certainly not unwanted. Similarly if I'm in the market for 3D goggles, and I receive an email from a company selling same, than that email is not unwanted.
Why would spammers ever want to more effectively target their "victims", when the cost of sending millions of emails is negligible? Simple. Trust. At the moment, I would not reply to a spam email selling a product I was interested in, simply because I see so many get-rich-quick spams that I wouldn't trust the spammer to give me anything for my money.
I can certainly see new Open Source programmers starting on Windows, and never even trying out Linux.
OTOH, perhaps it would simply be a "bigger pie"... Open Source Windows = more Open Source coders?
-SurturZ
...the two empty soup tins connected at each end.
[N.B. This is pure uninformed speculation based on my personal experiences]
I found that when I started working full time as a programmer, my shortsightedness started getting worse very quickly.
I reframed an old pair of (weaker) spectacles to use with the computer i.e. made some "reading glasses" (although, being -8.0 in both eyes meant that these were also short-sightedness spectacles; I can't read without my specs and I'm SHORT-sighted!)
My eyesight has stabilised and improved a little bit since doing this.
My theory is that our eyes evolved by looking at far away things, and that they're not suited to staring at an object only a meter away all day.
Damaged 3.5" disks have a smaller desktop footprint when used as a coaster compared to Compact Discs.
-SurturZ
Biggest evidence that they faked the landing, IMHO.
Don't worry, you won't have to eat "113.4g burgers with cheese" - we still have Quarter Pounders here in Australia - "we just don't know what the *&%# a quarter pounder is" (sure isn't 100% beef like the wrapping says).
http://www.zipworld.com.au/~surturz/threed/3dindex . tm
I should make more of an effort to keep up with the technology :-)
I remember upgrading from my VIC 20 to the C64. The first game I loaded was called "International Soccer". It took about twenty minutes to load of the cassette drive, but boy was it worth it.
I was stunned - it showed the players in an *oblique angle*!!! None of this "viewed from the top" or "viewed from the side" stuff.
Better still, they were *animated*!!! Can you believe it?!
http://www.c64gg.com/Images/I/International_Soccer _ingame.gif
Someone should set up an "Anti-Patent" website. A place where people can submit ideas, algorithms etc that they DON'T want to see patented - basically, a formal way of establishing the public domain.
A trust-worthy date stamp on each "anti-patent" would establish what was "prior art" and what was not.
Whereas broad patents are difficult to get accepted, broad "anti-patents" would be accepted easily.
This would make it easier for the patent guys (and defendents) to determine what was "prior art" and what was not.
Fewer patents = fewer patent problems
Here's an idea I've been mulling over for a way to enforce shareware "unlocking".
First, you only accept credit cards as payment.
Then, you have a registration key that uses only works for the combination of credit card number + name on the credit card + card expiry date.
Of course, you only issue the registration number when the credit card transaction is accepted.
Now here's the sneaky bit: you display the credit card details on the startup splash screen of the registered product.
This way, if they give a copy of the registered program to their friends, they are compromising the secrecy of their credit card number.
It's not foolproof (won't stop stolen cards or hacking the program with an assembler), but it might work well against casual piracy.
For companies that purchase your program, you might use the company name + company registration number - this is not as good, so you would charge a higher "company rate" for the product (which includes a site license, so you don't have to worry about a single-user license being copied within the same company).
The problem with piracy, as I see it, is not the technical aspect of protection, but the lack of penalty if you do so.
I've had 3D images on my website for years without the need for funny spectacles or wacky layered LCD screens....
x .htm
http://www.zipworld.com.au/~surturz/threed/3dinde
-SurturZ
Even scarier would be virii embedded in discussion board websites. Say for example, I embedded an HTML virus in this reply! (I haven't :-). I'm pretty sure most discussion boards filter out HTML.. but the readers are taking it on trust.
Also, what a new browser comes out supporting new HTML tags? If the web server is older than the browser you are using, those new tags may not be recognised by the web site as valid HTML... and therefore not filtered.
The best way to protect your kids from the internet? Simple. Put the computer in the lounge room, or wherever your TV is, with the monitor facing wherever you usually sit. I guarantee it's much better censorship that any sort of proxy or "safe surfing" software.
This "electronic paper" sounds like a thin magna-doodle to me!