Torvalds on VB

I know you expect this to be Linus slamming VB - but look what he had to say

Linus Torvalds wrote:

For example, I personally believe that „Visual Basic” did more for programming than „Object-Oriented Languages” did. Yet people laugh at VB and say it’s a bad language, and they’ve been talking about OO languages for decades.

And no, Visual Basic wasn’t a great language, but I think the easy DB interfaces in VB were fundmantally more important than object orientation is, for example.

I had a lot of respect for him before this, and even a little bit more now for his honesty

Huh! I have to say when I read the subject I though "huh, here we go". But I am pleasently suprised. VB is a great way to learn, and nowadays can see you right through to more complex development techniques.

My first real job was doing vba in access 2.0 forms and even with various daliences with other languages over the years I have allways ended up back doing VB.

I once read an interview with Linus Torvalds where he said somethign like "Windows is a great operating system that Linux has to catch up with, the main thing I don't like about Windows is the business model"

I'd like to see that VB.NET port for continue. It seems to be far behind Mono's C# implementation.I hope the Mono 2.0 framework will appear soon too.


Regards,
Vincent

Xaero_Vincent wrote:

...
I hope the Mono 2.0 framework will appear soon too.

Me too, I find it quite interesting.

Another thing I looking forward to with interest is; How will Microsoft  handle the fact that Mono has implemented ASP.Net and ADO.Net?

littleguru wrote:

Isn't Microsoft providing the Mono guys a lot support? I think they are just happy with it?!

If they are, then great!

I was thinking about the part regarding patents.

See Mono regarding patents

Mono web site wrote:

The controversial elements are the ASP.NET, ADO.NET and Windows.Forms subsets.

...

The Mono strategy for dealing with these technologies is as follows: (1) work around the patent by using a different implementation technique that retains the API, but changes the mechanism; if that is not possible, we would (2) remove the pieces of code that were covered by those patents, and also (3) find prior art that would render the patent useless.

Torvalds also hates slashdot.

IRenderable wrote:

Torvalds also hates slashdot.

Who doesn't? Old news with supposedly witty comments.

Tensor wrote:



Huh! I have to say when I read the subject I though "huh, here we go". But I am pleasently suprised.

Me too. What with his slating of GPL3, I'm almost starting to like the guy.

Tensor wrote:


VB is a great way to learn, and nowadays can see you right through to more complex development techniques.

My first real job was doing vba in access 2.0 forms and even with various daliences with other languages over the years I have allways ended up back doing VB.

When I was at university we all used SunOS and learned to program in C (if we didn't already) and I learnt C++ to program Windows in the 3.1 days and then there were a load of other people who thought Delphi was the bomb. The thing we all had in common was that we all too the p1ss out of Visual Basic. Then I graduated and my first programming job was using VB. It was a small company and the founder had written it's only product at home using VB before building the company up. I honestly believe that business wouldn't have existed if it wasn't for VB and there must be a lot more just like it.

I certainly had a much better appreciation for what was good about VB then and I worked there for 4 years. I did also suffer through 'classic' VB's limitations (mostly the lack of any kind of graphics API that didn't involve a 3rd party component or calling Win32 functions, and the heavyweight COM-based object model that made implementing things like binary trees impractical - you could do it but it was slow and ate up tons of memory). All that went away with VB.NET though.

.NET came too late for what I was working on there and after I left I learnt it via C#. Strangely enough though I'm back on VB with the job I just started a couple of weeks ago. I'm having trouble getting used to not putting semicolons on the ends of statements but other than that it's great (we're running some very large travel websites on it).

Linus is not your typical Linux/Open Source religious extremist.