November 18, 2009 at 10:24 am
Sorry. I forgot the wink...or did I???
I made the comment because too many people develop over engineered systems in an ad hoc fashion as opposed to following good software engineering practices.
I am sure that this is not what you were eluding too though.
...and no, I do not equate ad hoc with agile. They can be the same but so can improper waterfall!!!
Gaz
-- Stop your grinnin' and drop your linen...they're everywhere!!!
November 18, 2009 at 6:09 pm
Gianluca Sartori (11/16/2009)
rigid languages such as Java simply don't allow crap.
BWAA-HAA!!!! Someone please tell some of the folks I used to work with that!:-P
--Jeff Moden
November 18, 2009 at 9:56 pm
Gianluca Sartori (11/16/2009)
....Flexible languages such as VB.Net allow you to write crappy code, rigid languages such as Java simply don't allow crap....
VB.net flexible and Java rigid? Wow, that's a new one. Perhaps you mean weakly typed versus strongly typed languages. In any case, VB.net or Java are equally capable of producing crap.
November 19, 2009 at 1:37 am
Jeff Moden (11/18/2009)
Gianluca Sartori (11/16/2009)
rigid languages such as Java simply don't allow crap.BWAA-HAA!!!! Someone please tell some of the folks I used to work with that!:-P
Oh, that's ok Jeff! You're right, it's possibile to write crap in any language and I have coded crap in Java myself when I hadn't spent enough time thinking before typing. (Maybe I messed with tenses here, but it should be clear)
The point I'm trying to make is that when there's a good enough design, a good enough analysis and all good software engineering principles are followed, you just have to pick the language that allows you to translate that good design into good code, assumed that you can choose.
There are languages that don't allow crappy shortcuts and let you understand quite soon if you overlooked something. Other languages can give you so many tricks to make the whole thing work that you could finish the project without noticing that you could have done it better. Other languages simply don't have all the possibilities that would let you follow your design strictly.
That said, even when the design is good and you didn't overlook anything (did that ever happen to me?), the mere code could be as crappy as you can imagine in any possible language. But I'm expecting those capable of a good design to be capable of good code. And vice-versa with bad code.
-- Gianluca Sartori
November 19, 2009 at 2:18 am
No language can stop the rubbish this industry produces. Nor is it primarily languages' flaws at fault. Some of these so called faults are language features. Often it is either the use of an inappropriate language in an area of work or poor use of that language.
I put this down to a lack of self regulation. Whenever I have had the fortune to work on a project that has dedicated enough time and resources to the task at hand the results have been good. Whenever time and resources are not, be it too little or even too much, the results have always been suboptimal.
Steve, if you are reading this, how much longer until this thread gets into the Guiness Book of Records?
Gaz
-- Stop your grinnin' and drop your linen...they're everywhere!!!
November 19, 2009 at 8:27 am
Gary Istvan Varga (11/19/2009)
No language can stop the rubbish this industry produces. Nor is it primarily languages' flaws at fault. Some of these so called faults are language features. Often it is either the use of an inappropriate language in an area of work or poor use of that language.
Nicely put. It's the people, not the language. I think my take from this poll is that you can learn either C# or VB, neither really offering many advantages over the other.
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November 19, 2009 at 8:28 am
Gary Istvan Varga (11/19/2009)
Steve, if you are reading this, how much longer until this thread gets into the Guiness Book of Records?
It's a good debate, but it's a far cry from a record thread 😉
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November 19, 2009 at 8:32 am
Steve Jones - Editor (11/19/2009)
Gary Istvan Varga (11/19/2009)
Steve, if you are reading this, how much longer until this thread gets into the Guiness Book of Records?It's a good debate, but it's a far cry from a record thread 😉
I bet you know a longer Thread, Steve, don't you? 🙂
-- Gianluca Sartori
November 19, 2009 at 7:55 pm
"which is the better language?"
"what is the mother of all languages?"
those kinds of thread will never end :w00t:
oh no, no one answer those questions, it's only an example. :hehe:
November 20, 2009 at 8:21 am
November 20, 2009 at 9:06 am
Charles Kincaid (11/20/2009)
bear in a box (11/19/2009)
"what is the mother of all languages?"So have you looked at F#[/url] yet? There is a mother! I'll get my head around it. Yeah, byt the time they introduce Z# maybe!
same here, i was thinking of F# also as Dr. Dobbs had a brief email article about it.
January 20, 2010 at 9:15 pm
What can you do in one that you can't do in the other? Well, that's a stupid question - both languages are Turing-complete, so apart from limitations imposed by the storage available on the machine they are running on or by the lifetime of the universe you can compute anything that is effectively computable in either of them - anything you can do in one you can do in the other.
Which language is better? That may be are more sensible question, or maybe not. They both have full access to the various library functions/objects available through the CLR (although they use different syntax to do it) so there's no difference there. VB.net is a descendant of Basic, so it's based on crap. C# is a descendent of C++, so it's based on crap. So the question boils down to "which is the better brand of crap?". I don't think there's a useful answer.
I'll admit to a really stupid thing I do: I write JScript - and that's also based on crap! I find it slightly easier to read, write, and debug than VB.net (I also find C# easier to read etc. than VB.net, but not as easy as JScript) but maybe that's because of some of my background is in one of the Algol 68 variants (one that saw real industrial use).
If I had a free choice of languages "supported" by MS I would choose to write in F#, but that's not yet released for .net use (although you can get it if you want to use an unreleased language). That has its roots in Haskell and ML, both civilized languages, so unlike C# and VB.net it doesn't inherit much crap (and I had a hand - a very unimportant and minor hand - in the initial definition of one of those ancestors, so I find it easy to understand where it's coming from and I'm biased in its favour).
Tom
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