[Sussex] On the Other hand

[Gareth Ablett]

Geoff wrote:
-------------
> There are a lot of people out there who love COBOL still so be careful
what
> you say you scampish young whipper-snapper ;)

He he :)

> THe number of people here who've lectured me about how they were real
> programmers because they used to program in COBOL... *sigh*

noted and i know how the world thinks of Cobol it was jus me doing a IMHO
mode.

> The thing is, in the business world at least, 90% of programming is all
the
> same - connect to a database, do a few updates / queries and then maybe
> write some import/export routines and the odd report - frankly it sucks.

true alas what can you do with out some sort of file/data storage with a
program.

> As languages for doing this kind of work go, your best bet in terms of
speed
> of development are simple 4GL tools.  Unfortunately 4GL tools commonly
> (historically) lack some features that business developers need, and as
> companies seem to like to minimise the number of languages they are
actively
> using it often happens that VB is now the language of choice. Of course it
> is also the simplest language that Microsoft offer - which is a major
factor
> for your average manager - BTW, I found a chart of management types at my
> local vets surgery.. interesting to see that the most popular type of
> manager in the world is the "Romney Marsh"...baaaaaa...

> COBOL is at least reasonably simple - VB is far too complex a beast for
90%
> of the work it is used for (and for 90% of people using it).  Trouble is,
> you get a lot of complexity without all the power of a language like
Delphi
> (Object Pascal).  Frankly I think a language like Python or Ruby could
> handle everything VB has to do in the window's environment and do it far
> more elegantly.  Dammit, Java is a cleaner language than VB, less open to
> crapness and easier to read...


> ok... rant mode off...

Rant mode back on :)...

when I was being more of a young wipper snapper at the programming stuff. I
was
a big fan of Pascal and Delphi as it was a simple language and allowed me to
create
any application for windows that I so wished but alas this stoped with my
choice of
Operating system. I was waiting ages for the release of Kylix but but to my
disapointment it was more based on the C++ Builder coding platform rather
then the
Pascal coded Delphi. but if there was a sort of delphi for Linux I would
have
created a long list of desktop application by now (pity).

even now I do most of my coding with PHP and other webbased languages that
for would
be the fasted and most versitile way of creating a system for database
access as it
can be choped and chaneged soo easily, yet i know that it has it short
commings for
a lot of uses because of security and stuff. but then most programs can be
decompiled
these days aswell.

In the words of Geoff 'ok... rant mode off...'

Gareth Ablett


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