VB was Re: [Fsfe-uk] BECTA discriminate against FLOSS?

[Simon Waters]

Chris Croughton wrote:
> On Sat, Jan 03, 2004 at 08:19:44PM +0000, ian wrote:
>
>>Anyone that sells any MS products is effectively working for MS.
>
> OK, in that way.  But I don't sell MS software (OK, I did buy it in the
> case of Visual Basic, but that's because it is /the/ best GUI
> development package in my opinion for what I want, no FLOSS equivalent
> comes near it).

I agree VB is a great development environment - I've heard it trashed by
people who have never used it in anger, and who seem to think real
programming languages need multiple inheritence or some other arcane
programming concepts, I don't think these people live in the real world.

Apart from being prorprietary, it also uses a proprietary languages and
produces executables that only run on proprietary platforms. All of
which are major lock-in issues, and should worry developers.

In this sense you probably were "selling Microsoft software", as what
else was this code run on?

There are excellent proprietary development environments with similar
functionality which allow you to code in languages which have support
from multiple vendors, and work across platforms (including free
platforms). JBuilder was the only one I used professionally.

I trawled around the free software stuff about a year ago and came to
the conclusion that good integrated graphical development environments
still weren't quite there - please tell me if things have changes.

There was an interesting GNU Enterprise stuff being developed in the
style of Oracle forms, but still only limited applications. I suspect
that basic form filling type applications are still the bulk of business
code being written, and most of that I see being done in the free
software world is done with web forms, which aren't terribly good tools
for it in my opinion (not that I haven't written a few).

pgpC9HwUFxLr_.pgp
Description: PGP signature