tlhouse@nyx.cs.du.edu (fiver) raves:
> I don't know from pop, but I *DO* know Basic is pretty much garbage when
> compared to other GOOD languages ..
Then pop isn't the only thing you haven't a clue about my friend.
I've been earning a Very Nice living as a Microsoft Basic programmer for
a while, writing single user, LAN and recently WAN applications and I have yet
to encounter a situation where I felt I was being held back by the language,
or had to settle for something less then I intended because my tools could not
accommodate the needs at hand. Point of fact, I don't know of any other
programming environments that could make me more productive then Microsoft
Basic has, and particularly Visual Basic (at least as regards MS/DOS Windows
application development) and I've looked at a lot of them.
> I'm talking just normal, everyday basic, none of these silly basic
> compilers that look more like Pascal than Basic to me
Yah. Right. Funny how other languages are allowed to grow and
evolve, C becomes C++, Fortran goes through it's changes...and so on, yet
Basic somehow must remain locked into it's original implementation. Why? So
language dweebs could have something to look down their nose at?
Let's talk about Silly. I'm working on a contract at a major regional
utility company. Their online work measurement system supports about a dozen
timesheet data entry people located at several separate locations, generates
on demand and batch monthly reports for corporate management (about 50 kinds
of reports altogether that encompass everything from single technician
productivity to workforce productivity, annually, monthly and weekly by area,
unit, product type and so forth), manages 17 relational database tables
(currently running about 700 Meg each for the five largest tables in it).
We are currently working on connecting it to a mobile data terminal system
(which will eventually replace most of the timesheet data entry people). It's
tiled windowed interface breaks the parts of the timesheet, database
maintenance and order forms into manageable segments that are easy for the
users (even supervisors) to comprehend and it is as fast in response time as
anything I've seen on a WAN no matter what the location of the end user.
From conceptual design to prototyping to implementation the system
took just under six months to complete with one guy (my supervisor now) doing
the bulk of the coding for the online segments (I was hired on to write the
batch report programs, and now I'm designing and coding the MDT interface).
It's been in continuous service for over a year and a half and not once has it
crashed (the Novell server it runs on is, alas, another story...) despite the
best efforts of our technicians, data entry people and managers to feed it
garbage and abuse it. You want Silly? What's Silly is explaining this to a
visiting contract programmer from another department who's watching,
impressed, while someone is using the system (and just from a strictly visual
point of view the thing looks slick as hell...) and then saying to them "Oh,
and it's written in Microsoft Basic" and then seeing the =Silly= look on their
faces. Basic? Basic?!
Yup. Basic. It's been earning me a good living for quite a while
now. And it's getting better all the time, particularly since Visual Basic
came out. Several months ago a few journals held a contest for custom
Windows applications (in house...not for resale); 15 of the 21 finalists
wrote in Visual Basic. One issue of one of my Basic journals has an article
in it from a guy at Hewlett-Packard concerning Visual Basic interfaces for
VXI Instruments. In the past two weeks, I have received three =unsolicited=
requests for my resume, each with particular focus on the fact that I work
in Microsoft Basic (They were interested in both Visual Basic for Windows and
for DOS). I still can't figure out where they got my name from, as I have
not contacted any of these companies myself (nor do I intend to leave where I
am, at least until my projects are finished).
I know there are some programmers and instructors who hold a kind
of religious hostility towards the Basic language. Fine. Less
competition for me. The corporate managers I work for probably don't know a
GOSUB from a DECLARE SUB but they know TIME = MONEY and when they see me
produce complete professional grade applications that meet the specs, run
quickly and reliably with significantly less prototyping/testing/debugging
time, and source files that are generally smaller and easier to comprehend
(because they don't resemble the output a cat makes walking across a
keyboard...) and maintain I have no trouble getting repeat business. None.
Every now and then some idiot asks me why I stick with Basic and not
learn to use "a Real(tm) language like [insert name of Real Language here]"
and I respond politely that I'd rather swim in a pool full of rabid weasels.
I have deadlines to meet. If I wanted to spend my time generating or
maintaining tens of thousands of lines of obscure obtuse and hard to debug
source code I'd go work at a University or for the Government or somewhere I
didn't have to show a profit for my time spent.
IF BasicKnowledge%(Opinion$) < 0 THEN Opinion$ = ""
-Bruce Garrett
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