Re: Delphi? Futureproof re vb!

On 2007-12-12, Suzy <not@valid> wrote:
Hi all

I bought a book to see if there was some sense in "upgrading" to dot net!
(assuming that newer is better). The book is the Dummies Guide to VB Net
Express. The book so far has about a fifth of the space taken up saying in
effect what a retrograde step vb net is, thought up by programmers thinking
as programmers and not users, with the "help" even worse, and that VB
express is an attempt to "go back". About a twentieth of the book gives new
(to me...) syntax, and the whole of the rest describes programming concepts
which are easy to understand (variables, loops etc) and are in fact exactly
as vb6. Apparently dot net express is an attempt by Microsoft to get back
to the vb6 concept which they should never have left!

I am unwilling to ditch all I have learned about vb6, which I find adequate
for all I want to do, and at the same time it is obviously a waste of time
to get into dot net given that a) it is so uninstinctive and "up-themselves"
(pardon this) programmer-orientated, by which I mean "never mind the user";
let us revel in our own world", and b) who's to say that after making the
effort I won't be marooned again by Microsoft as they change platforms
again?

So, the alternative seems to be Delphi. Could anyone comment? Is the
similarity of Delphi to vb6 enough to allow easy transition? Will Microsoft
try to break the workability of Delphi with future Windoze versions? Given
that Vista is also apparently a disaster, I wonder if I should ditch
Microsoft entirely and go to say Red Hat?



Might I just say, that going to Delphi, is probably not a wise choice.
First, your in your precieved situation because you tied yourself to a
vendor specific language - one that is not available from anyother
vendor. It seems to me that moving to Delphi is going to put you into
EXACTLY the same situation. No, if you want to avoid future "lock-in"
then you need to choose a language that either has a standard attached
to it or is availabe from multiple vendors. You can further enhance
this by choosing one that is available cross platform as well...

So, here are the languages that I would look at:

1) C++: Standardized, Multiple Vendors, lots of available tools ranging
in price from free to multi-thousands of dollars, can be cross platform (that
depends on the coder).

2) C#: Standardized by ECMA and ISO. Multiple vendors - Microsoft,
Novell (via the Mono project). At one time, there was 3rd
implementation by the FSF, called dotGNU, but I'm not sure what ever
became of that project. Currently, there are official Mono implementations
for Windows, Linux, Solaris, FreeBSD, and MacOS X. All are binary compatable,
meaning that your exe compiled with VS can run on all those OS's
(provided of course that the libraries/classes have been implemented -
and currently that's like 99%). It also works the other way -
applications that I write and compile on my Gentoo Linux box can run
fine on my windows boxes (again, provided I don't use Mono specific
libraries/classes). Further, Mono has it's own VB.NET compiler as well,
so you don't even have to use the C# language :)

3) Any of the open-source scripting type languages also are viable
options - Perl, Python, Ruby, etc.

4) Java - especially now since it has been open sourced.

No matter what you choose to do, there will be a learning curve.
Especially if you choose a language in the C family, like C++, C#, or
Java. But, then again your going to have a learning curve going to
Pascal anyway. I played with Delphi once - stank to high heaven, IMHO.

--
Tom Shelton
.

Relevant Pages

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