Re: Object Rexx to become Open Source
From: Gerry Hickman (gerry666uk_at_yahoo.co.uk)
Date: 10/19/04
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Date: Tue, 19 Oct 2004 22:28:51 +0100
Hi Al,
> underneath. In fact, I would go so far as to say you are not particularly
> objective about this. Of course, it can be difficult to be objective about
> an issue in which one almost religiously believes in the absolute right of
> his point of view. Please don't take offense at that, as none is intended.
Yes, I see what you mean, but the "religious" belief wasn't just picked
out of thin air. I tried to state reasons as to how those beliefs came
about as we went along. Don't forget I started out in the VB world. In
fact it raises an interesting point. If standards don't matter too much
as long as the "job is getting done", and if "ease of use" is important,
then tell me what happened to "Visual Basic" and VBA??
You could apply the same arguments to those two as you apply to
VBScript, but both Visual Basic and VBA are dead! Microsoft saw the
bigger picture, and now provide multi-language support.
> above is one such case. Some tools are so easy to pick up that one can get
> somewhere by using them poorly - and then never improving much because of
> the bad habits that result. Believe me, I have seen some abysmal examples of
> scripting, whether with vbscript or batch. There is something to be said for
> the concept of "discipline" in coding, even at the expense of making the
> platform picky about what you code.
Yes, that's one thing I like about case sensitive languages; when it
comes to ADSI and WMI properties and methods you really don't want the
case mangled. Most experienced VBScript'ers follow the case correctly
anyway. JScript can bring some extra "self docunmenting" too in that
methods MUST have brackets and "collections" are distinct from "arrays"
when it comes to enumeration. It makes it much easier to visualize
what's going on at the COM layer.
One other thing you can do in JScript is comment out huge blocks of code
with /*...*/, I can't remember if this is possible in VBScript?
>>Yes, there's quite a few companies make this mistake.
>
> Now, see, there is where you go sounding somewhat less than objective...
Hehe, I thought you'd like that!
> Something that recently occurred to me is this: are you pro PERL/jscript
> over vbscript mainly because those languages are more standards-bound, or
> because they are IYHO, intrinsically better? If because they are
> intrinsically better, would you flaunt standards if they went in what you
> felt to be the wrong direction. If because they are standards-based, would
> you migrate to a platform that you felt was muddle-headed if the standards
> people happened to switch that way? I'll be really interested in your
> answers to these questions.
This is an extremely good question! In fact I think it's what drove
Microsoft for years. Let's look at a classic example ... the web.
[tongue in cheek mode]
There's no reason for "open standards" on the web, we don't need silly
HTML or JavaScript and we don't need HTTP. What we need is Microsoft
"SuperWeb" technology, a proprietary (but superior) technology for
driving the internet.
With SuperWeb, it's all done in binary so pages are smaller and load
faster, there's no silly "stateless" HTTP protocol to worry about so
passing authentication and persisting data between pages is a breeze (no
silly cookies for example), no one needs to learn HTML, they just fire
up Microsoft Word and type their document.
Need some wizz-bang features? No problem, with SuperWeb you read/write
files straight to the user's hard drive, and their email is stored in a
special variable any time you need it!
[/tongue in cheek mode]
Sounds good? But that's the day Microsoft's blinkered vision of the
world came crashing to a sudden halt, and everything about IE4, IE5 and
IE6 was all about how well it complied with "W3C this", and "ECMA that".
For years their browser was the most standards compliant on the planet
and it's still pretty good to this day.
As for PERL/JScript being "better", yes I genuinely believe they are
better. However JScript under WSH is only really accessing the same COM
interfaces as VBScript so it really comes down to the language itself.
PERL is on another level alltogether; no one disputes it's more
powerful, the main problem (under Windows) is that it's not built in,
and that's the main reason I use JScript instead. I also find JScript
more "modern" than PERL (at least up to 5.x). But PERL isn't just about
making calls to WSH, it's got a huge API built-in (albeit in a tiny EXE
file) which means you make low level calls when you need to (a bit like
C). You can also plug-in all kinds of crazy stuff - e.g. you want to
output to PDF? No problem! Just get the PDF module. You want your
server's performance graph sent to a web browser as a GIF and refreshed
every two seconds?, again just get the "graph" gizzmo. You don't have to
"install" the PERL modules like you do with ASP ActiveX and they don't
write to the Windows registry or limit you to only using that specific
server, you just put the module with your code and off you go.
> I tend to agree, not so much because I see anything particularly wrong with
> .NET (please let's not take that branch in this thread), but because each
> new scripting/whatever paradigm promises so much, only to be discarded when
> the next one comes along.
The main headache for me at the moment with IT is the constant changes.
In years gone by, an upgrade was ALWAYS better than what you had before.
Now I find the "update" is often just to make extra money for company X
and many times they break earlier useful functionality or add annoyances
like pop-ups or constant visits to the "upadate" website. None of this
relates to doing our jobs overseeing corporate IT, it just makes things
complicated for no reason. It's absurd I have to patch IE and Media
Player on production Windows "servers" when you consider no one is even
allowed to log into them locally! All this stuff is forcing me to look
at non-MS alternatives. Can you believe they released a new server
platform (2003) with an internet browser you can't uninstall?
> Yes, I do know what you mean. But I somehow manage to get use out of
> dictionary objects and vbscript classes, because, once they have been built,
> they provide a more flexible platform for coding than the (hated!:-)
> function-type interface. I'm not saying it's better than JScript, just
> better than vbscript *without* those things.
You're right, once you set up the classes it becomes far more elegant.
> Actually, I shudder at the thought of making an obvious fix in open source
> code only to find out it actually screwed something else up...
No, it's really not that bad, you can always test it on your local box
before you copy it to the server anyway. It's saved me a few times, and
you often find the authors will implement your changes in the next
release - it's great, and you even get to chat to the authors.
-- Gerry Hickman (London UK)
- Next message: Scott Marquardt: "Re: Script a double-click?"
- Previous message: Tony: "login script to map to Users home directory"
- In reply to: Al Dunbar [MS-MVP]: "Re: Object Rexx to become Open Source"
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