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Visual Basic might be second to only PHP in the amount of terrible code it has allowed shadetree porogrammers to create.
Are you not familiar with javascript?
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It's not garbage collected, but also, not completely manually memory managed either. I can't quite recall how it works but it's mostly some sort of ref counting + some manual. When teaching, non-GCd languages just get in the way. You don't want students apps to be segfaulting constantly because they're running into memory errors whilst you're trying to teach them something else. Learn programming and get confident wi…
>>My programs crashed with the dreaded access violation >>error all the time. Debugging that sucked. I assume >>it's better these days. How would automatic garbage collection help in a scenario where you are deliberately accessing an object that you haven't created or have destroyed already?
My point is that there's a lot to learn when you start out programming. Most developers don't write manually memory managed code anymore so it's a skill that can be pushed far down the list of things to learn, and trying to learn it right at the start will just get in the way.
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The only thing that you seem to be right about is the low level device control stuff. Everything else is pretty much already easy enough to do in Java. The language was designed with multithreading in mind.
"...multithreading in mind..." - Easy and efficiency are 2 different things. Java synchronization primitives and it's ability to flip bits incur heavy performance penalty when compared to native ones. You might not care about it but I do. You are also free to point me to a good DirectX framework in Java and/or the one that let's you write Directshow and Media Foundation filters and graphs as well. Besides your logic…
I think your knowledge on this might be a bit out of date. If you look at the Unsafe class (in old versions of Java) or the VarHandle class in newer versions, you can implement synchronisation and bit flipping with the same efficiency as Delphi, indeed it compiles down to optimal machine code.
You are also free to point me to a good DirectX framework in Java and/or the one that let's you write Directshow and Media Foundation filters and graphs as well.
Well, you can do this, albeit nobody really does because Java code tries culturally to be cross platform so using DirectX would be an odd thing for it to do. There are COM frameworks that let you write COM objects in Java. Whether you can do high performance image processing does depend on whether the JITC auto-vectorises though, at least until the vector API ships.
But you can for instance instantiate a JavaFX video player and then apply hw accelerated effects to it. Writing your own image filters would these days be best done in shader languages or lots of AVX anyway, so neither Delphi nor Java would really be appropriate for that.
Windows desktop: sorry I'll choose Delphi any time.
Yes, if you want to specifically write a Windows-only desktop app (that isn't WPF/WinUI/the new stuff I guess) and use lots of Win32 specific APIs, then Delphi is going to be better at that. On this we fully agree.
Still, these days people mostly want to write for at least Windows and macOS if not also Linux. And then you can write a good desktop app with JavaFX and the java packager tool (with native installers and the general appearance of a themed Windows app).
FWIW I used Delphi for years in the 1990s, even wrote a 3D video game with it in OpenGL. I've also written cross platform desktop apps with Java/JavaFX. So I have a lot of experience of both to compare them against. Delphi was fantastic at the time, and I still sometimes point out to people how the web platform fails to compare to even Delphi 2 + Windows 95 in many ways. I don't think we're really so far apart. But times have changed and Delphi wins only if you compare it to the web.
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All modern tools are really complicated compared to Delphi. I remember Delphi was so intuitive to design GUI and program its events so i could start making my own programs right after professor showed me how to make a button and handle onClick event.
Well, in all fairness, the same can be said about Visual Basic and all the .NET languages. And I'm not even a Windows programmer.
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What does it matter which programming language they learn in high school? It's not supposed to be the language you use for work. It's supposed to teach you to program. If anything it should be mandatory to learn something else. It might be the only non-work programming language they will ever learn. Cradle to grave Python / Java? Would Common Lisp / Haskell be considered a bad / good / ancient choice?
technically it does not matter. The trouble is students HATE learning something they think is a waste of time. I've found it impossible to convince them that the first language doesn't matter. If they just learned anything they'd progress at roughly the same rate, but when their motivation is impacted it makes a bigger difference.
This reminds me of a few ( I then found out that they were being taught to use Borland Turbo C . I suspect the case for this is similar: Some person who once upon a time learnt to program and then never practiced nor developed their skills somehow got a job teaching programming, and is now trying to apply the ancient tools they were taught somewhere around the time when some fish decided to walk on land because its a…
10 Years ago? Pfft, we are still taught C with Borland turbo C in our CS engineering course.
I remember back then(2002'ish), Pretty much all CS labs had Borland Turbo C.
The funny thing was the output prompt would disappear after printing things, so to hold it there, people would add getch(). This was so common, I remember at one point people treated getch() was something you always added at the end of the main(), like a return statement.
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Borland C and Pascal were great for learning programming in mid-90s, because of one crucial feature: an immensely good built in help reference. Whenever you wanted to know syntax of some command, you print this command, press ctrl-f1 and is presented with docs, complete with a working example . It was insanely great. Remember, stack overflow didn't exist then.
Turbo C++ documentation was legendary, with a healthy dose of humor! https://everything2.com/title/7+hertz+-+the+resonant+frequen...
Infinite loop: see Loop, infinite.
Loop, infinite: see Infinite loop.
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Since the early days of my career, people keep predicting the demise of the programmer. I remember CASE tools, and then Microsoft with VB were signs of the end. Roll forward 30+ years in IT, and complexity keeps going up, and programmers are still needed. Maybe I'm just old, but I'm probably going to retire, and AI is not going to replace any programmers. From what I see, the quality of the software in Corporate Amer…
Visual Basic might be second to only PHP in the amount of terrible code it has allowed shadetree porogrammers to create.
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Yeah those are definitely things that new programmers need to learn, but they usually need to learn them by doing things the hard way a few times first. "yeah, that's a lot of copy and pasting isn't it? Want a neat trick to save yourself some effort?"
Have you tried that yourself on a variety of people? (I have)