Re: Holloween II: Microsoft Plugs Linux
From: Anonymous <nobody@replay.com>
By the standards of the ... developer accustomed to VB [Visual Basic], these tools are incredibly primitive."
How strange! I just talked about that paragraph with a friend of mine and he missed the EXACT same key words that you did. You LEFT OUT THE KEY WORDS! The actual message said:
By the standards of the novice / intermediate developer accustomed to VB/VS/VC/VJ, these tools are incredibly primitive.
Which is completely correct. What I replied to the buddy: Well they *are* [primitive]. You have to write a MAKEFILE for crying out loud. You can't go from error messages to the source code / line in your editor (unless you use Emacs). It's so stupid. Someone could write a simple (scratch-itch) OSS IDE and dominate the market in no time. The funny thing is that this was the DOS situation... MS hasn't been out of "primitive" for that long itself. Of course for experienced developers, GCC's 140 platforms (w/ cross-compiling) and optimizations and all is killer. But what's the ratio of less experienced to sophisticated developers? ~mark
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
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Anonymous -
Mark Lanett