[Info-vax] [OT] Programming languages, was: Re: Long uptime cut short by Hurricane Sandy

[Paul Sture]

In article <kehjtf$t2m$1 at dont-email.me>,
 David Froble <davef at tsoft-inc.com> wrote:

> VAXman- @SendSpamHere.ORG wrote:
> 
> >> Yes, I know about C++ :-), but I have decided not to go down that path
> >> for my own embedded projects. What is been taught by universities as
> >> Ada's replacement these days ?
> > 
> > Visual BASIC
> > 
> 
> I'm well aware that you intended that to be a joke.

PHP cum MySQL might be nearer the actual truth.

>  However, while 
> there are things I don't like about VB, and some things I REALLY don't 
> like about VB, it is fairly easy to use and much can be done with it.

I haven't used VB since V3 but my 3 main objections with that were:

1)  there was no line continuation character. This led to horizontal
    scrolling where you couldn't see the lines above or below the one
    you were inputting (17" screen were still an expensive luxury
    Back then).
2)  the IDE persuaded you to copy and paste code that in another
    development environment I would have written as subroutines
    included at either compile or link time.  Yes you could include
    source code at run time, but it had to be in ASCII rather than
    interpreted format.  Nope not going there for a production
    environment.
3)  The VB documentation was scattered with bits of encouragement
    to leap off into C to write DLLs (see point 2).

I bought Delphi instead, which was Pascal based and had nice things like 
inheritance; creating templates to give a set of related apps the same 
look and feel was easy to do.

> Took me a while to get used to "event driven", and then even more time 
> to write programs without events.

I didn't mind that bit.

> Some of the worst things weren't even VB, but weendoze.  The concept, as 
> I understand it, of "blocking operations" on weendoze socket 
> communications blocking all other socket operations, not just in that 
> program, or process/job, but the entire OS.  Gag, gag, gag ...

The problem I had when moving to NT4 was that so many of the apps I was 
using assumed that the CPU belonged to them.  My offline news reader for 
example polled the keyboard continuously and used almost 100% of the 
CPU.  Fortunately the system I had then had 2 CPUs so I could nail that 
app onto the second CPU and still do other useful work.  Also fortunate 
was that that app was still being actively developed so a fix came along.

-- 
Paul Sture