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> All the actual design work happened in the C# world, and our job was just to tag along and mimic whatever they had come up with. What's the unique guiding ph
by shawnz 4y ago
> All the actual design work happened in the C# world, and our job was just to tag along and mimic whatever they had come up with.
What's the unique guiding philosophy or use case of VB that would justify developing bleeding edge new language features in VB first? Maybe I am just being overly critical here but I just don't see how the use cases which VB accommodates would benefit from getting new features before C# gets them, and the divergence would create unnecessary pain across the whole ecosystem
- marssaxman 4y agoI always saw Basic as the language for non-professionals who wanted to create their own software: hobbyists, amateurs, small business owners, people who have an idea and want to automate whatever it is they're doing, but aren't trying to write code for a living. C#, by contrast, is a proper mainstream language for professional programmers.
- adra 4y agoReplace basic with Lua and read your line back. Just because a language is simple doesn't mean it can't have industrial purposes by whatever gauge you measure things. Theres a bunch of things I wouldn't use basic for just the same with C# and "popular-language-here". Probably the most used programming language is VBA or maybe the Excel macro if you consider that a language.
- marssaxman 4y agoDid that remark come across as a criticism? I did not mean it so; distributing the power of programming as broadly as possible has always been a central value in my career, and that's why I joined the VB team in the first place. I meant that while it made sense for cutting-edge language development to happen elsewhere, I had thought that VB would have been a great place for work on improved human factors. How can we design the interfaces for this complex system so that people who do not yet have (and may never gain) a strong mental model of its architecture will nevertheless be able to improvise their way to success? That's where I thought the value of VB was.
- shawnz 4y ago> while it made sense for cutting-edge language development to happen elsewhere, I had thought that VB would have been a great place for work on improved human factors. Thanks for clarifying, this makes sense to me and it's unfortunate you didn't get to see this through to fruition
- steve1977 4y agoI've definitely seen VB6 applications powering for example bank counter systems. This has been a while ago though.