case for open lang on win32 - fill in the table

[Joseph Robertson]

nielsenjf at my-deja.com wrote:

> power and cross-platform (Where I work we're going 100% microsoft and
> 100% visual basic). The main argument being visual basic/vbscript is so
> easy to use and the only other viable option is C++ which is too hard
> (in their opinion).

Good grief, man get out of there FAST!<G>  100%VB  yuk.  Also sounds like a
group that doesn't know how to use the "right tool for the job".

> IMHO, python has a feel similar vb/vbscript except it doesn't have
> the vb world's limitations.

Python is many orders of magnitude better than VB...

> For example, you can do everything COMwise in C++.
> Choose any other language and you start to make compromises.
> What is there that you can do in C++ that you can't do in python?
> In what cases is visual basic(a probably weaker language) better than
> python to use?

Real world example:  I have several VB apps that I "inherited" over the
years.  One is fairly large, and was using DAO simply to handle the large
text files (via ISAM) and provide sorting, searching, etc.  Using Mark
Hammonds' Python-COM support I have ripped the DAO nonsense, made a mess
into a logical class heirarchy, and provided common base functionality
available to other supporting apps.

So I have 4 major Python-COM objects for this app and VB is just the GUI to
tie it all together.  The app is faster, handles very large (90K+lines)
flatfiles, reusable, smaller, and cleaner(more logical).  Once I get a
descent grid done in Tk even VB can be removed.  Did I mention portable,
the COM code are merely wrappers, so the base code is there for any
platform to use.  And Python runs on about 28 more platfoms than
VB.<teehee>

Point is, use VB for its strength...GUI frontends, and Python for its
strength...strong, fast core functionality.
6 versions and VB string handling still suks roks...

As an added bonus, I also recreated 2 of the COM objects on VC++6.0, and it
took about 3 times as long to do it, and I started with a working Python
object.  Needless to say I am a firm Python-COM believer.



Thanks, Mark!


Joe Robertson
jmrober1 at ingr.com