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