A case for programming in Visual Basic

[giza]

http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000006.html

(Hint: It's not the langauge. It's the programmer.)

Comments

[thraxarious.livejournal.com]

So if your company is hiring a bunch of sloppy coders, choose VB?

Eh... I admit C++ and memory management is kind of wierd, the super fine control over memory in C++ and ASM can really speed up your code, and come at a cost if you don't cleanly give everything back.

I need to reinstall a good C++ compiler and work on my code.

[giza.livejournal.com]

If I need speed, I'd use C++. But if I'm building a website that only gets a few thousand hits a day, there's no way I'm going to slug it out in a language that does memory management. I'll use something like PHP instead.

What I got out of the article was, "Good programmers will write good code in any language. It just so happens that a lot of poor coders use VB because it's so easy to pick up".

I see the same thing for PHP, too. Go check out php sometime. I see SO many questions from noobs there that don't understand the first thing about programming or how HTTP works.

[thraxarious.livejournal.com]

I've always been a fan of "The Right tool for the right job" in situations where you need speed, dump it to C++ programmers, or even ASM... web development can be done on something less mighty, sure...

Eh, just wish that a more efficient code was popular enough that business could get the benifit of code churned out quickly and cheaply while maintaining less processing overhead while not sacrificing adding in bugs and memory leaks.

[shockwave77598.livejournal.com]

I use VB to make GUIs for the user to interact with. I use C for all my embedded parts. A typical design has a PC running a VB program and communicating with a uC running timecrit and rubber-meets-road stuff.

[pyesetz]

Joel is absolutely correct that malloc-style heap control is for shits.  But you don't have to switch to VB!  Simply add Hans Boehm's "conservative" garbage collector library to your C program, then stop calling free, and it just works.

BGC is included in most (all?) Linux distros because it happens to be the standard garbage collector for the GNU Java compiler.  It also runs under MS-Windows, OS X, etc.

Now if only BGC could collect the conservative garbage from the Republican party...

[unciaa.livejournal.com]

So, to summarize, "Implementing features in higher level languages is faster!"

No shit. That's their whole point. A Ferrari is faster than a tank too, but I wouldn't drive to war in a Ferrari, nor drive a tank on the road. The problem with VB is that people who start in it tend to become crummy programmers. Have some class and go for .NET at least.

[shockwave77598.livejournal.com]

I've built my own "Memory Trace" system for the Coldfire processor. You call MTTFree or MTTalloc and additional structures trace what has been used so in the event of a reset condition, one can free all the previously used memory. This is a common problem in RTOS systems - the OS doesn't reset but your program does, so all the memory you allocated earlier are lost forever. Do it too much and you have no ram.

[shockwave77598.livejournal.com]

Harder to hit the Ferrari though :)

[nemetfox.livejournal.com]

That's right.
You drive -away- from war in a Ferarri.

[unciaa.livejournal.com]

With its ground clearance I imagine it'd get stuck on the first molehill, though. :3