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

[Daniel Weinreb <address@hidden>]

Michael Vanier wrote:

>But your toaster is a closed, black box. 
>
Well, you're applying the analogy more broadly than I had intended. I 
wasn't trying
to contrast advanced programming to not programming at all.  I was trying to
contrast advanced programming to simple programming.

The programming
that most VB programmers do is a lot less general and powerful than the 
programming
that you do. VB programmers are indeed programming, but they aren't 
doing a lot of
what you consider to be the things that make programming interesting. 
They are just
putting together an application that does some stuff that's customized 
for their own needs
but is really quite simple from a programming point of view. The fact 
that VB isn't
particularly good for the stuff that you described as "interesting" 
isn't really relevant
to most of them, because they're not trying to do stuff like that, and 
they really don't
want to.

Of course I'm oversimplifying and there isn't just one canonical VB 
user.  There's a whole
range, and there's a high end that wants to start getting into more 
"interesting" stuff, just
as there are people who really do use all those hyper-advanced features 
in Microsoft
Word.  But it's one of those 80/20 things where most of the users are 
using only a small
fraction of the available flexibility.