5 ms·

Are useful and powerful the opposite of sucky to most people? Not to me. Consider a parallel example: Visual Basic (pre-.NET, think ~3.0) opened up programmin

Are useful and powerful the opposite of sucky to most people? Not to me. Consider a parallel example: Visual Basic (pre-.NET, think ~3.0) opened up programming for GUIs to a much much broader audience (because Hypercard was made for a far less popular system). VBmade embedding hugely powerful applications within your own, remote object calls simple, etc. It was the most popular programming language. It was incredibly successful, useful, and powerful. None of that could change the fact that it fundamentally sucked though. It sucked so much though that Microsoft killed it. They killed their most popular programming product ever. They killed the product that was used to make most of the applications for their platform, their office suite, their web server, their database server, etc. In the transition to .NET they apparently they felt its foundations were so fundamentally flawed that they had to redesign the language.

phaedrus 16y ago
I agree with your thesis but I wouldn't classify classic VB as particularly powerful either. Usually when people say a language is powerful, they seem to mean that a small number of primitives can be combined to produce a large variety of structures or that brief code can accomplish a lot of work. Maybe a better term for powerful would be "power to weight ratio".
- roryokane 16y ago
  The term for that idea would be “efficient”.
- ggruschow 16y ago
  You're right: it's primitives sucked. However, VB let people do a huge amount of work without code: Think the GUI designer, VBX/OCX controls, and OLE embedding. That's the power i was talking about, not a way to implement advanced algorithms. (People used freaking SQL databases to get passable data structures... Ugh!) Most code I've seen people writing was more related to that gluey crap than advanced topics. Side-note: Most of my work in the past year has been done in R.
  - derefr 16y ago
    Those weren't really parts of the language, though; they were parts of the platform. We inconsistently compare languages (i.e. Java) to platforms (i.e. the JVM), which is, I think, a lot of the reason we're so bad at comparing both.
hga 16y ago
"It sucked so much though that Microsoft killed it." Hmmm, I prefer the explanation that they just lost their Raymond Chen style backwards compatibility religion. Note that they did the same with Windows right after the release of XP. Joel has a lot more to say about this: http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/APIWar.html http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/APIWar.html
- ggruschow 16y ago
  Perhaps you're right.. Have they continued to eliminate features they didn't like in releases since 2002? As far as I could tell, VB.NET wasn't an upgrade to VB6, it was a product introduced to smooth the transition to C#... like Lotus 1-2-3 shortcut compatibility in Excel. VB.NET simply couldn't do what I was using VB for. It's like if you went to the hardware store and they told you that instead of selling hammers, now they sell screwdrivers. They're better because they're easier to get out, they hold better, etc. That's all fine and good.. unless you've got a truck full of nails and the roofing contract calls for the shingles to be nailed in.

phaedrus 16y ago

I agree with your thesis but I wouldn't classify classic VB as particularly powerful either. Usually when people say a language is powerful, they seem to mean that a small number of primitives can be combined to produce a large variety of structures or that brief code can accomplish a lot of work. Maybe a better term for powerful would be "power to weight ratio".

roryokane 16y ago
The term for that idea would be “efficient”.
ggruschow 16y ago
You're right: it's primitives sucked. However, VB let people do a huge amount of work without code: Think the GUI designer, VBX/OCX controls, and OLE embedding. That's the power i was talking about, not a way to implement advanced algorithms. (People used freaking SQL databases to get passable data structures... Ugh!) Most code I've seen people writing was more related to that gluey crap than advanced topics. Side-note: Most of my work in the past year has been done in R.
- derefr 16y ago
  Those weren't really parts of the language, though; they were parts of the platform. We inconsistently compare languages (i.e. Java) to platforms (i.e. the JVM), which is, I think, a lot of the reason we're so bad at comparing both.

hga 16y ago

"It sucked so much though that Microsoft killed it." Hmmm, I prefer the explanation that they just lost their Raymond Chen style backwards compatibility religion. Note that they did the same with Windows right after the release of XP. Joel has a lot more to say about this: http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/APIWar.html http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/APIWar.html

ggruschow 16y ago
Perhaps you're right.. Have they continued to eliminate features they didn't like in releases since 2002? As far as I could tell, VB.NET wasn't an upgrade to VB6, it was a product introduced to smooth the transition to C#... like Lotus 1-2-3 shortcut compatibility in Excel. VB.NET simply couldn't do what I was using VB for. It's like if you went to the hardware store and they told you that instead of selling hammers, now they sell screwdrivers. They're better because they're easier to get out, they hold better, etc. That's all fine and good.. unless you've got a truck full of nails and the roofing contract calls for the shingles to be nailed in.