In defense of Visual Basic

[Mike Meyer]

beliavsky at aol.com writes:
> Much snobbery is directed at Visual Basic and other dialects of Basic
> (they even have "basic" in their name), but I think VBA is better
> designed than the prestigious C in some important ways.

C and VBA have totally different application domains. Given any two
such languages, it's almost a given that either one will be better
than the other "in some important ways".

> It is trivial to allocate and pass multidimensional arrays in VBA, but
> C requires expertise with pointers. The subroutine print_matrix can
> query the dimensions of xmat, so they don't need to be passed as
> separate arguments, as in C. The fact that is tricky to do simple
> things is a sign of the poor design of C and similar languages, at
> least for non-systems programming.

Since C was desinged as a systems programming language, evaluating
it's design for non-systems programming is a pointless exercise.

Personally, I think of C as a "portable assembler". You write
time-critical code, important applications, and the kernel in it. You
let your HLL compilers generate it. Other than that, you ignore it.

> People bash VB as a language the corrupts a programmer and prevents him
> from ever becoming a "real" programmer. Maybe VB programmers quickly
> get so productive with it that they don't need to fuss with trickier
> languages.

I've not really heard a lot of nasty comments about VB, though I have
about BASIC. Nuts, I've said a lot of nasty things about BASIC. But VB
is so far removed from the BASICs I worked with that the point is
moot.

I have heard that VB is much more productive than "conventional
languages" (usually meaning C/C++/COBOL/etc.). Then again, this is
ture of modern "scripting" languages. That's where VB started life,
even though it's now compiled. So this should come as no surprise.

     <mieke
-- 
Mike Meyer <mwm at mired.org>			http://www.mired.org/home/mwm/
Independent WWW/Perforce/FreeBSD/Unix consultant, email for more information.