Comments on: Sometimes it makes me feel dirty… http://www.jeffdarlington.com/2006/11/13/sometimes-it-makes-me-feel-dirty/ The personal blog of Jeffrey T. Darlington, creator of General Protection Fault Sat, 05 Dec 2009 02:07:38 +0000 hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.0.1 By: Big Bubba http://www.jeffdarlington.com/2006/11/13/sometimes-it-makes-me-feel-dirty/comment-page-1/#comment-108 Big Bubba Tue, 05 Dec 2006 04:09:42 +0000 http://208.78.96.240/?p=65#comment-108 In school I was in the "MS-is-bad-linux-rules" club. I was on the sparc g++'ing away as much c++ code as I could write. Then I started learning Visual Basic to create GUI programs that could actually help people who are not computer literate or c++ and linux-environment-variable-fixing geeks. So I realized that anything one could do in VC++ or C++, one could do faster and "almost" better in VB. Of course, it won't buy your brownie points with the geek culture but programming is about making things simpler not harder. :) Of course, the above statement exclude processor intensive code. Mostly server side coding which is heavy on the loops and number of sockets and such would be faster in C++. For your average vanilla user applications, using file I/O and database dips, and regular stuff VB is more than adequate and in fact the best choice. Moving to the corporate culture, I realized that Java cross-platform mantra broke down pretty fast since most of the corporate products I saw had to have third party plug-ins for Java to do this or that. This really broke it since most third party controls were geared towards your MS Windows user. Plus configuring 10,000 environment variables and %JAVA_HOMES% all day long is hardly programming or having fun. Add to that the fact most of what Sun has done in the past 5-7 years has been 1) b**ching about MS and 2) break all backward and compatibility between JREs. Try telling a customer who paid $100,000 for a piece of software that only runs on JRE1.3 that they have to move to JRE1.5 because your app uses some new features. We've had real corporate clients who can't move because sometimes two JRE won't co-exists without breaking a ton of stuff. Anyhoo, I did quite a lot of Delphi 5 - 7 (which is Object Pascal) and liked it. Also been doing VB for a good while. Now moving to the C# world, I see things that were Java influenced and they're really annoying. Namespace abuse is definitely one of those things. I've also done some Java using Eclipse and yes, it does makes things so much easier. I mean talk about right-clicking to make your JAR files. Anyhoo, I much prefer MS products now. Someone bought the product. They paid for support. When you implement a solution and the MS side of things break, the customer can call a support number and it's not your issue to lose sleep over. If it's open source and it breaks and no one's seen it or fixed it, then it's your problem. Especially, if most of the open source your try to use is only used by a niche market. Like compiling some open source SIP SoftPBX just to realize 5 weeks before production date that it doesn't support some feature yet the way you expected it or the way the RFC called for. Besides, none of us is coding in assembly (like Yoshi :)) anymore so really are any of us any more geeky than the other? Just some thoughts, I felt like I'd share from the other side of the fence you mentioned. :) I'm still open minded to using Java and non-MS stuff and I do use it for work. Just sharing personal preferences. In school I was in the “MS-is-bad-linux-rules” club. I was on the sparc g++’ing away as much c++ code as I could write. Then I started learning Visual Basic to create GUI programs that could actually help people who are not computer literate or c++ and linux-environment-variable-fixing geeks.

So I realized that anything one could do in VC++ or C++, one could do faster and “almost” better in VB. Of course, it won’t buy your brownie points with the geek culture but programming is about making things simpler not harder. :) Of course, the above statement exclude processor intensive code. Mostly server side coding which is heavy on the loops and number of sockets and such would be faster in C++. For your average vanilla user applications, using file I/O and database dips, and regular stuff VB is more than adequate and in fact the best choice.

Moving to the corporate culture, I realized that Java cross-platform mantra broke down pretty fast since most of the corporate products I saw had to have third party plug-ins for Java to do this or that. This really broke it since most third party controls were geared towards your MS Windows user. Plus configuring 10,000 environment variables and %JAVA_HOMES% all day long is hardly programming or having fun. Add to that the fact most of what Sun has done in the past 5-7 years has been 1) b**ching about MS and 2) break all backward and compatibility between JREs. Try telling a customer who paid $100,000 for a piece of software that only runs on JRE1.3 that they have to move to JRE1.5 because your app uses some new features. We’ve had real corporate clients who can’t move because sometimes two JRE won’t co-exists without breaking a ton of stuff.

Anyhoo, I did quite a lot of Delphi 5 – 7 (which is Object Pascal) and liked it. Also been doing VB for a good while. Now moving to the C# world, I see things that were Java influenced and they’re really annoying. Namespace abuse is definitely one of those things.

I’ve also done some Java using Eclipse and yes, it does makes things so much easier. I mean talk about right-clicking to make your JAR files.

Anyhoo, I much prefer MS products now. Someone bought the product. They paid for support. When you implement a solution and the MS side of things break, the customer can call a support number and it’s not your issue to lose sleep over. If it’s open source and it breaks and no one’s seen it or fixed it, then it’s your problem. Especially, if most of the open source your try to use is only used by a niche market. Like compiling some open source SIP SoftPBX just to realize 5 weeks before production date that it doesn’t support some feature yet the way you expected it or the way the RFC called for.

Besides, none of us is coding in assembly (like Yoshi :) ) anymore so really are any of us any more geeky than the other?

Just some thoughts, I felt like I’d share from the other side of the fence you mentioned. :)

I’m still open minded to using Java and non-MS stuff and I do use it for work. Just sharing personal preferences.

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