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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
by 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 agoThe term for that idea would be “efficient”.
- ggruschow 16y agoYou'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 agoThose 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.