Development time is minor compared with the remainder of the life cycle. While hacking for personal use, the joys of assembler are sufficient for a limited number of users on a single machine (or at least machine type) but totally insufficient (read full rewrite) when the spread of types available is included. IOW the classic fight between programmers and software engineers goes on. PHM Declan McCullagh wrote:

I have never programmed in VB, though I have written machine code. Nowadays I do my work in Perl with some C and am quite happy.

That said, I suspect you can craft some useful programs in VB, and if it speeds development time without greatly influencing running time, why not do it? I'm too cranky to get religious about these things any more.

-Declan

On Thu, Jun 07, 2001 at 10:59:17PM -0700, Morlock Elloi wrote:

...

...

And to never write the way poets do, oddballs do, gibbering idiots do, for that will allegedly diminish the value of your writing the way the payers want you to write, that is to

The language is extremely powerful. Many do not realise that, so, to follow anon's analogy, VB-heads keep on droning correctly, and cannot even think outside microsoft-sponsored visual basic. For them it is the blessed and only way for their fucked audience to "understand" (and compiler to compile).

They look down to snippets of machine code, which they cannot write, because for them the writing is equal to scripting microsoft's interpreter. I bet that many deny the very existance of assembly programs.

But machine instructions can be really dangerous, they can fuck up the brain with new associations and synapses, and do things which VB-ers cannot dream of, literally.

For writing VB-shit by pathetic "wordsmiths" is not really writing at all. It is just symbolic xeroxing of master's 5 commandments in 17 prescribed shades. Nothing can be said in VB, really.

-- Paul H. Merrill, MCNE, MCSE+I, CISSP PaulMerrill@ACM.Org

Ever so true -- but now that I work at the system level rather than the code level I greatly prefer You to They. Makes my life ever so much better. PHM David Honig wrote:

At 11:56 AM 6/10/01 -0400, Paul H. Merrill wrote:

...

of types available is included. IOW the classic fight between programmers and software engineers goes on.

Conjugate: I architect systems You engineer software They program

-- Paul H. Merrill, MCNE, MCSE+I, CISSP PaulMerrill@ACM.Org