[ILUG] [OT] Which programming language ?

[Gareth Eason]

	Before suggesting the my reference to VB was 'flamebait', please 
actually read the original posting. VB is a FINE development language 
for GUI on a Windows platform - AND follows the Microsoft Windows HUI 
guidelines - or at least makes them easy to follow. Borland, in their 
infinite wisdom, chose to ignore them and other HCI studies and insisted 
on doing their own thing for a long time. (Yes, I know you can set it to 
use the MS APIs and Class Library - but it's not that way by default!)

	For a 'non-programmer' who wishes to learn a language solely for the 
purpose of developing a simple GUI with a minimal amount of back-end 
processing, VB is ideal for the job!!! No question about it.

	If you read the entirity of my mail, you'll also notice that it was not 
my first suggestion and that I gave an explanation of my thinking also :-)

	In short, Microsoft-bashing for the sake of it is counter-productive - 
quite apart from just being very very silly. I often feel the need to 
deride certain features of Microsoft's offerings - simply because they 
break, are unstable, poorly thought out, badly implemented, 
counter-intuitive, incompatible with themselves and/or other things, 
badly documented, documented with a big pack of lies, etc., etc. But to 
consider the mere mention of Visual Basic as 'flamebait' is just daft 
(IMHO) :-)  It was a fair answer to a fair question, given that Windows 
and GUI had already been mentioned...?


ASIDE:
	I've been playing about with glade and mono a little of late - and have 
found that glade is (almost) surprisingly easy and stable to use (though 
has a few layout 'issues' that I've not come to terms with yet...) and 
mono is now stable enough to write test and PoC code on, if not quite 
ready for a production server yet (IMHO.) I'm immeasurably pleased that 
the day has come when I can write code on my Linux box - and test it 
there - that then seamlessly integrates with Microsoft's latest C# / 
.NET offering on their 2003 server platform.


	Best regards,
	-->Gar



ccostelloe at flogas.ie wrote:
>>        If you must have a native Windows GUI, then Visual Basic (.NET or
> 
> 
> I resisted this flamebait for as long as I could.  Apart from feeding the MS monster, encouraging someone to learn Basic is not good.  I agree with the others who suggested Java may be a better solution, but Borland's Kylix is a much better option than MS - you use Pascal or C++, and it is cross-platform between Windows and Linux.  I find it fine, but Kylix 3 needs a bit more work by Borland (which I understand they will do, once they get over the .NET porting for Delphi and CBuilder).  If you get frustrated with Kylix, write the application in Delphi or CBuilder and when Borland catch up, Kylix should port it to Linux.
> 
> 
>>whatever version they have now) is easy to pick up and can be used to
>>bolt together an application such as yours (I'm guessing, from the sound
>>of what you describe) fairly quickly and easily. ODBC support is
>>relatively good, so you can still use whatever database you like in the
>>background, 
> 
> 
> Borland's producs are much more advanced than MS and quicker at getting the GUI aspect running (Microsoft's .NET offering is a poorer and blatant copy of Borland's products), and Kylix does ODBC and more.  I personally use Firebird on Linux for the database server, which is like ODBC++.  With Kylix, you don't even necessarily need to write any code at all, you can link visual components to the database, if you wish.
> 
> </rant>
> 
>>and do some/all of the processing on the client machines, if
>>you like. This does, of course, tie the clients to a Windows OS for the
>>life of your program. (Though it may run happily under wine/winex.
>>
>>or mono, any day now ... 
> 
> 
> I did not hold out any great hope for Mono initially, but it is now a real contender - most component writers are now seriously seting up for Mono ports.
> 
> Ciaran
>