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

[David Froble]

Paul Sture wrote:
> 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).

Line continuation got put in somewhere.  I've used V6.  It's an "_", 
where I was familiar with "&", but that's a minor bitch.

> 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.

This is definitely doable.  My issue was that Microsoft saw fit to take 
just about every term for familiar things and rename them.  At least use 
different terminology than I was used to on VMS.  This is very difficult 
for me.

> 3)  The VB documentation was scattered with bits of encouragement
>     to leap off into C to write DLLs (see point 2).

Can now be written in VB.

> 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.
> 

That was the MS-DOS way.  What I read was that many of the weendoze 3.11 
and weendoze 95 developers (I use the term loosely) had a real hard time 
with interrupts and such.  Totally foreign to their thought process.