Mark Lanett <mlanett@meer.net> writes:
By the standards of the novice / intermediate developer accustomed to VB/VS/VC/VJ, these tools are incredibly primitive.
Which is completely correct...
Perhaps I missed the part of Visual Basic that was supposed to be "incredibly" less "primitive" than GCC and PERL. Unfortunately, I have to actually *use* VB5 for my employer (who will remain nameless, other than to say that they're one of the world's largest electronics manufacturers, and firmly in bed with Micro$oft). So far as I have been able to discern, its only advantage is the ability to prototype screens quickly. When it comes to actually *debugging*, any reasonably large program causes enough system crashes that you've got to try to build mini test environments to test out individual pieces. (Yup, it's exactly as good a programming environment as M$ Word is a desktop publishing environment.) Sure, GCC is just a compiler. But my combination of GCC, DDD, and XEmacs provide a development environment that is more powerful than any of Microsoft's products, as easy to use, and is just as "mouse- friendly". (Hell, I use GCC instead of VC for NT code, too.) Maybe I've been out of the "novice" stage for too long to understand the attraction of VB. But the other hardware engineers (certainly novice programmers) in this group won't touch it except at gunpoint either. But its use -- like that of NT itself -- has been mandated from above by beancounters and IT managers. -- CurmudgeonMonger