Can Python replace Visual Basic? Should it?

[Werner Schiendl]

Well, I know Visual Basic pretty well and used it for some projects in the
past.
Mainly to develop custom ActiveX controls with a proprietary data interface
and special requirements.

I _really_ enjoyed the ease of that process in Visual Basic compared to, e.
g. Visual C++'s MFC and ATL.
Of course on is limited in some ways, but for us it did a perfect job.

It's a bad idea to do rather low level stuff in Visual Basic, because its
really painful to juggle bits and bytes in VB.
But you can code that part in a DLL and use those functions from VB (does
not need to be a COM server, just a plain DLL is sufficient, although a COM
server integrates much better with VB...)

What I am still missing in all the alternatives for Windows programming is
the easy integration with the native Windows component model (DCOM). Doing
it manually is really a pain and completely unnecessary for so many
programming tasks.

If you are programming for purity in code, if OO is theoretical stuff for
you consisting of inheritance, polymorphism and encapsulation, or if a
really wonderful intuitiv IDE with far the best autocomplete and library
browsing features I have seen so far is just pain for you because you prefer
coding the GUI in plain text -> do not consider Visual Basic

Otherwise its a neat tool for the purposes mentioned.

I did not do much COM stuff in Python right now, but I think you cannot
compare it to Visual Basic at this time.
Of course, Mark Hammond does a really impressing job on that issue, but
Microsoft is still somewhat in advance with VB I think.

hth
werner


D-Man <dsh8290 at rit.edu> wrote in message
news:mailman.984094514.29514.python-list at python.org...
> On Thu, Mar 08, 2001 at 02:10:22AM +0000, Brad Bollenbach wrote:
> [snip]
> |
> | Maybe the fact that only one person who saw my original post has
> | actually migrated from VB to Python is an answer in itself.
>
> Maybe there are other reasons entirely.  For example, I am not a VB
> programmer, nor have I ever used VB.  Maybe there just aren't many
> people on this list who have used VB, or more specifically used VB
> before using Python.  And again, maybe not.  I come from an Eiffel,
> C++, Java, C background (pretty much in that order) mostly on *nix
> systems.
>
> -D
>
>