RE: Small time coding [Was: Re: About Visual Basic [Was: Industry versus academia]]

["Anton van Straaten" <address@hidden>]

Geoffrey Knauth wrote:
> Sometimes those VB developers actually achieve liftoff, and as they
> climb out of ground effect, they quickly notice VB's limitations and
> come right back down to Earth.  That would be the perfect time to offer
> them this nifty VB to Scheme/Python/Ruby/Smalltalk translator, to let
> them continue with their ideas instead of starting all over.

In a sense, that's what Microsoft is currently trying to do for users of VB
6.  The translator is the VB.NET Upgrade Wizard, by many accounts not quite
as wizardly as might be hoped - from:
http://visualbasic.about.com/library/weekly/aa120102a.htm

"...converting VB 6 programs to VB.NET just isn't a very good idea. Gary
Cornell goes on to say this in his book:

'You may be tempted to think that you can use the conversion tool and a
little bit of fiddling to move your VB programs to VB.NET. Do not go down
this path.'

"The bottom line is that VB 6 and VB.NET are so different that you will
almost always benefit from simply starting over and creating a whole new
program the VB.NET way."

Someone offering an alternative path around about this time might have some
success...

Anton