[ILUG] [OT] Which programming language ?

[ccostelloe at flogas.ie]

On Thursday 9 December 2004, Gareth Eason wrote:
>
> 	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

Basic is not a good language, and Microsoft's VB implementation is poorly thought-out - if you have to program below the skin, you will find yourself having to chase & patch side-effects.  

>  - AND follows the Microsoft Windows HUI 
> guidelines - or at least makes them easy to follow. 

Ah yes, the guidelines that MS are famous for breaking in their own products?  They were actually IBM's ones anyway, whose definitive book was part of the Windows 3.0 SDK, back when they were buddies.  

> Borland, in their 
> infinite wisdom, chose to ignore them and other HCI studies and insisted 
> on doing their own thing for a long time. 

I am not sure how a tool has the potential to get the developer to misuse components.

> (Yes, I know you can set it to 
> use the MS APIs and Class Library - but it's not that way by default!)

Thankfully.

> 	In short, Microsoft-bashing for the sake of it is counter-productive - 
> quite apart from just being very very silly. 

I was not Microsoft-bashing for the sake of it.  At least Kylix is Linux-compatible with no disadvantages compared to VB, allowing migration to Linux desktops.

> 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. 

Most of those comments have been applied to VB and Microsoft's GUI guidelines.

Ciaran