Re: java developers
On 12/5/2011 4:31 AM, Silvio Bierman wrote:
On 12/05/2011 04:28 AM, Arne Vajh?j wrote:
On 12/3/2011 4:51 AM, Silvio Bierman wrote:
Luckily I have almost always been in a position where I could work with
my language of choice. In the remaining cases I have been forced to use
languages like Visual Basic (I disagree with other posters that it is
the right tool for anything except for further messing up an existing VB
program),
VB was actually a very good language for what it was intended
to be used for.
I personally disagree strongly. At the time I was forced to use VB6 I
was an experienced Win API programmer using C++ with extensive knowledge
about the internals of DLLs, ODBC, COM, MTS and who remembers what else.
Which makes it a waste to have you do VB.
First I had to use MFC where MS had done a very poor job of mapping the
already crummy Win API to C++. But knowing what was under the hood made
it somewhat manageable.
Then I had to use VB6. I will hand it to you that making a very basic
GUI is easy using VB. But anything beyond a toy application becomes a
challenge. To develop something like a custom control or GUI building
block and reuse that, possibly multiple times in the same application is
impossible to do at the language level only. Perhaps it could be done
with ActiveX but having done that in C++ and knowing what hassle and
overhead it would introduce I never bothered with it in VB.
Suddenly it became clear to me why the existing application I had to
work on contained so much duplicate code.
There is a gazillion GUI's out there that does not need custom
controls, GUI building blocks etc. - they just need a form and to
execute a few lines when a button is clicked.
And there are millions of developers out there that can do that,
but would never be able to work with C++, MFC etc..
Java, C#, C++ etc. can do a lot of more sophisticated
stuff.
But the typical business app GUI does not need sophisticated
stuff.
That depends on what you call sophisticated. The absence of object
oriented language mechanisms makes programming an event driven GUI
(which basically screams for an OO approach) kind of clumsy. I think you
only get away with that if the business app is small. In my case it
consisted of about 120K lines VB source.
Sure it becomes clumsy.
But if the VB guys is done with the app before the real
programmer has decided on the class hierarchy, then ...
Developers with good programming skills and lousy business
understanding tend to bad mouth VB - Mort etc., but ...
I have been running my own business for 17 years now so I suspect there
are others who bad mouth VB, as you put it.
Never heard of Mort????
I think that there are two
prominent reasons organizations use(d) VB on a new project: either the
developers don't know any better (or put differently: there are no
developers available who can work with different tools) or the project
is (or at least starts out) very small. Both might apply. The projects
that start small but then grow big are the ones where VB starts smelling
bad.
It was often the fastest and cheapest way to get things done.
There are probably many reasons behind the Win8 WinRT change of
direction at MS.
But I strongly suspect that one of the reasons is that MS has
realized that C# (and VB.NET) is not a good replacement for
VB for simple GUI's, so now they are trying with HTML, CSS and
JavaScript.
I suspect this has little to do with deliberations about programing
languages, they are an afterthought for them. MS has probably realized
that their desktop oriented strategy is doomed in the not so long run
and they need to move on towards mobile and cloud enabled apps etc.
So they create a new platform for desktop development, because they
think desktop development is doomed?
That does not make sense to me!
Arne