Re: Small time coding [Was: Re: About Visual Basic [Was: Industryversus academia]]

[Gordon Weakliem <address@hidden>]

Anton van Straaten wrote:

>On the language design side, one interesting technical point about VB is
>that it has *optional* variable type annotations.  Prior to VB.NET at least,
>typechecking was still dynamic, not static, but the optional annotations are
>nevertheless a useful capability, which would be nice to have in some of the
>other dynamically-typed languages.
>
It should be noted that VB.NET is quite a bit different from prior 
versions, and MS took a lot of heat for those changes.  In .NET, VB 
programming is barely different from C# and choosing boils down to 
whether you like curly braces or not.  I think that a lot of VB 
programmers feel like .NET is a step backwards in many ways (no editing 
a program while running, for instance, though that's supposedly coming 
real soon).

Anton's point about easily producing GUIs is very key.  I've been doing 
Windows programming my entire professional career (9 years) and I can 
attest that pre-.NET, VB was at least an order of magnitude faster to 
develop in than C++.  If you're doing DDE, make that 2 orders of 
magnitude.  While we're on the subject, PowerBuilder and Delphi (to a 
lesser extent) fit into the same category as VB.  There's a good sized 
market for those kinds of languages.  PowerBuilder even out VB's VB.  
VB's source is actually text and you can edit it in a text editor in a 
pinch, but AFAICT, PowerBuilder has no text representation: it's the IDE 
or nothing.