Terry Donaghe wrote:
> By the way, just about all the development at Carolina and Power (which now
> has some other name since they bought a power company in Florida) is done
> with Microsoft technologies. And gee, the company does just fine.
Heck, they're surviving a MS OS. How can a VB app bomb any often than that.
And I'd like to interview a) the system admin b) the software maintainer
I'm not taking just your word for it. (Heck, you've sold out to the Dark
Side of the Force ;)
> I am currently involved in an application at Honeywell which uses multiple
> components written in Visual Basic 6. Oh dear, since this software is so
> horrible, it must be a big mistake! Nope, works just fine. Does the job.
Many things can do the job. If we're remaining within cost-effectiveness
and deadlines, is this the best thing that does the job?
> Let's see... Fortune 500 company Becton and Dickinson trusted me to write
> several very important business components for their SAP deployment - in
> Visual Basic. Status? Works just fine.
If it's running on a Redmond OS, I'm sure it crashes less often than
the server has to be rebooted.
> Intel, *gasp* uses Microsoft technolgies. Intel, Samantha, is a very large
> company. And they use Microsoft technologies, including Visual Basic and
> Active Server Pages.
Er, have you somehow missed the term "Wintel"? It is rather telling.
Intel is the Microsoft of semiconductors. 'nuff said. Never, ever a single
decent product they themselves have developed. Same flavour of business
practices. Luckily, IBM left the evil triumvirate long ago, and Intel seems
to make movements in that direction.
> It makes me wonder, if Visual Basic is such a "weak" tool, why so many huge,
> succesful companies bank on it...
Technical excellence is not a necessary part of a successful business.
Business acumen is.
> I don't want to take anything away from the legions of Java and
> Unix/Linux/WhateverElse programmers out there. They do work just as good as
> us VB guys. :)
If OpenSource stuff is any good, and draws the best people, it should give
the companies using them fitness advantages. Granting, there are vogues, as
there are management vogues, but I think we cannot yet tell whether the
advantage of OpenSource is real and sufficient to make a difference in the
Real World (i.e. is sufficient to kill off a number of propritary warez
peddlers).
Apart from that, shouldn't we quit the rabid advocacy? It's off-topic, and
makes one look rather foolish, as it makes a bad kind of pattern.
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b30 : Mon May 28 2001 - 09:56:24 MDT