The general tone of the discussion though (not just this thread) was that VB is to easy to use and therefore should be immediately dismissed as a "serious" programming language.
Some folks wrote: >>You have a *major* misconception of how things operate in your phrase "Linux can't agree on the guts behind their GUIs", as though "Linux" were a company deserving of "their". To cut to the quick, don't do it:) and >>Thanks for amplifying his point. Yes I guess I do have a major misconception. I am new to Linux (it was installed at home until recently...I just built a new machine and haven't reinstalled it yet) and I am only going by what I have experienced. That experience, thus far, has been chaos, in a controlled sorta way. Thus my comments regarding KDE and Gnome and COM and VB.
No I suspect that despite all of our collective whims as programmers that there be something we can hang our hats on as being "consistent" or "available" across platforms, for various reasons, that just doesn't exist.
Unix folks don't like COM because its from Microsoft. Microsoft folks don't like Corba because it reminds them of Unix. We programmers decide how we want to approach the problem. In the end we decide what technology lives and what technology dies.
As to your pity being directed at us poor VB programmers, thanks but no thanks. VB has an amazingly productive UI. It sure beats the hell out of 4 xterms and writing my own make files.
I just recently took a class in X-Windows. There was a relatively simple excercise that we had to do. There were 3 sliders Red, Green, Blue. We had to chnage the color of the client area based n the RGB value of the sliders. We were using Motif. It took me a few hours (I was new to X...thus I was taking the class). The teacher asked for volunteers to bring in development stuff from work and i volunteered. In front of the class I did that same excercise in about 2.5 minutes using about 10 lines of code.
So I maintain...just because something is simple to use, doesn't mean smart people shouldn't use it.
Just because something is simple to use doesn't mean smart people shouldn't use it. Not to be a little out of line here but I use VB for 85% of my work and I have to say that as a language it isn't as bad as some would like to think it is. It has great object based charcteristics and its devotion to COM makes component creation a snap. What VB does is allow you to abstract away the GUI. A textbox is a textbox. Theers nothing magical about it anymore, and it shouldn't be teduious for us programmers to add one to an app we are creating. There isn't a tool out there that makes adding GUI elements easier than VB (save Delphi...which has a very VB'ish interface). Alot of Microsoft's success is directly related to the tools they provided for business programmers to get their jobs done. The other thing that makes VB attractive is the way it allows easy access to various databases. In literally 1 or 2 statements you can be connected to just about any relational datastore, assuming you have an ODBC driver for it. Data is the blood of the IT revolution. Easy access to that data is a big plus. What people don't realize about VB, is that it can be used to create very powerful software components using COM, or the Component Object Model. For the last several years I have been developing statistical COM components for use in various projects here at Educational Testing Service. Once created (if created with care) these suckers fit in everywhere....they can be used in ASP scripts in IIS, in a Word macro, and even a larget program written in C/C++. You can fault Microsoft for many things but you have to give them credit for consistency. Everything Microsoft does is centered on COM. They have focus. Imagine if there were a VB like tool for Linux. What a tool that would be. Unfortunately Linux can't agree on the guts behind their GUI's (will it be KDE's version of CORBA or will it be Gnome's self created version?). What major market vendor is going to gamble on the outcome of that horse race. So again I reiterate, just because something is simple to use doesn't mean smart people shouldn't use it.
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Who cares. Java applets suck, have always sucked, and will always suck. They are slow. They are, in effect, useless.
hey...whats the matter with green!
:)
Agreed.
The general tone of the discussion though (not just this thread) was that VB is to easy to use and therefore should be immediately dismissed as a "serious" programming language.
Any good VB programmer avoids the data bound controls like the plauge.
Has Borland released Delphi for Linux?
:)
If so I am in line.
Some folks wrote: >>You have a *major* misconception of how things operate in your phrase "Linux can't agree on the guts behind their GUIs", as though "Linux" were a company deserving of "their". To cut to the quick, don't do it :) and >>Thanks for amplifying his point. Yes I guess I do have a major misconception. I am new to Linux (it was installed at home until recently...I just built a new machine and haven't reinstalled it yet) and I am only going by what I have experienced. That experience, thus far, has been chaos, in a controlled sorta way. Thus my comments regarding KDE and Gnome and COM and VB.
That was a well written and reasoned response.
You write in referring to COM on other platforms:
?Do people even want such implementations?
No I suspect that despite all of our collective whims as programmers that there be something we can hang our hats on as being "consistent" or "available" across platforms, for various reasons, that just doesn't exist.
Unix folks don't like COM because its from Microsoft. Microsoft folks don't like Corba because it reminds them of Unix. We programmers decide how we want to approach the problem. In the end we decide what technology lives and what technology dies.
As to your pity being directed at us poor VB programmers, thanks but no thanks. VB has an amazingly productive UI. It sure beats the hell out of 4 xterms and writing my own make files.
I just recently took a class in X-Windows. There was a relatively simple excercise that we had to do. There were 3 sliders Red, Green, Blue. We had to chnage the color of the client area based n the RGB value of the sliders. We were using Motif. It took me a few hours (I was new to X...thus I was taking the class). The teacher asked for volunteers to bring in development stuff from work and i volunteered. In front of the class I did that same excercise in about 2.5 minutes using about 10 lines of code.
So I maintain...just because something is simple to use, doesn't mean smart people shouldn't use it.
Starting with VB 5.0, VB produces avtaul EXE's and is no longer interpreted.
Underneath they use the same compiler as the C/C++ folks do.
Just because something is simple to use doesn't mean smart people shouldn't use it. Not to be a little out of line here but I use VB for 85% of my work and I have to say that as a language it isn't as bad as some would like to think it is. It has great object based charcteristics and its devotion to COM makes component creation a snap. What VB does is allow you to abstract away the GUI. A textbox is a textbox. Theers nothing magical about it anymore, and it shouldn't be teduious for us programmers to add one to an app we are creating. There isn't a tool out there that makes adding GUI elements easier than VB (save Delphi...which has a very VB'ish interface). Alot of Microsoft's success is directly related to the tools they provided for business programmers to get their jobs done. The other thing that makes VB attractive is the way it allows easy access to various databases. In literally 1 or 2 statements you can be connected to just about any relational datastore, assuming you have an ODBC driver for it. Data is the blood of the IT revolution. Easy access to that data is a big plus. What people don't realize about VB, is that it can be used to create very powerful software components using COM, or the Component Object Model. For the last several years I have been developing statistical COM components for use in various projects here at Educational Testing Service. Once created (if created with care) these suckers fit in everywhere....they can be used in ASP scripts in IIS, in a Word macro, and even a larget program written in C/C++. You can fault Microsoft for many things but you have to give them credit for consistency. Everything Microsoft does is centered on COM. They have focus. Imagine if there were a VB like tool for Linux. What a tool that would be. Unfortunately Linux can't agree on the guts behind their GUI's (will it be KDE's version of CORBA or will it be Gnome's self created version?). What major market vendor is going to gamble on the outcome of that horse race. So again I reiterate, just because something is simple to use doesn't mean smart people shouldn't use it.