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The Microsoft Empire Reboots

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Re: The Microsoft Empire Reboots

#91

Post by WoodenChair »

quonn wrote: post #34
david927 wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you're right, and it's a huge indictment. The web, as an application platform, is worse than VB ever was. Think about that for a moment: We've regressed from VB. The usual tradeoff is: easy to write, hard to extend and maintain. But the web is hard to write and hard to extend/maintain. We have some of the smartest people in the world in our industry, and evidently we're all idiots.

A common complaint, but I don't think it's true: Web applications are _much_ more flexible as far as screen size and device types are concerned and they are multi-user, networked by default. If you would want to achieve both of these with a VB-like approach, it would be just as complex. I think the most important issues with the web that are not already being addressed (and winning) are a statically typed Javascript…

You're focusing on what's good about the Web and not addressing what's good about VB (that's what this thread is about): a stable API platform, and easy WYSIWIG GUI design. The Web (or at least the tools for it) largely lacks those two things.

Re: The Microsoft Empire Reboots

#92

Post by UnoriginalGuy »

MichaelGG wrote: post #66
Immortalin wrote: post #15

Their greatest mistake(s) were the removal of visual basic 6 line of products and windows 10. Visual basic 6 is my first programming language and is probably still my favourite. The problem with lua and python and most other "beginner friendly" languages is that it is hard to do anything useful when u are just starting other than printing hello world to terminal. My intro to vb6 was creating a simple calculator, it w…

I've personally watched an essentially-non-programmer take VB.NET, drag-n-drop, write some event handlers, and have a functioning little app. So while VB6's IDE is faster than the ".NET" Visual Studios, most of your other complaints are really not valid.

Yeah the complaint is ridiculous and this coming from someone who learnt on VB 6. VB 6's IDE cost $500+ at the time and even getting the education edition was a huge PITA (it was HEAVILY pirated by students).

VB.net and C# (and F#) are free [legal] downloads from the internet and both just as capable as VB6 was back in the day (the things Visual Studio Pro and above add aren't really relevant to beginners, except the testing framework perhaps).

Plus back in the day I found VB 6 quite limiting. For 101 level stuff it is plenty fine, but once you want to go beyond simple applications (e.g. games) you're left almost fighting the language and libraries itself.

With C# in particular, while it is certainly slower than Go/C/C++/D/etc, that's really the only major limitation. You can definitely access much more of Windows' API infrastructure, it supports unsafe code, the .Net framework is more comprehensive, and the language features are extremely modern (F# more so). There really is no limits except execution speed.

Honestly kids today are extremely lucky. I would have killed to be learning on C# back in my day. Fuck VB 6.

Re: The Microsoft Empire Reboots

#93

Post by lbruder »

gurkendoktor wrote: post #16
Immortalin wrote: post #15

Their greatest mistake(s) were the removal of visual basic 6 line of products and windows 10. Visual basic 6 is my first programming language and is probably still my favourite. The problem with lua and python and most other "beginner friendly" languages is that it is hard to do anything useful when u are just starting other than printing hello world to terminal. My intro to vb6 was creating a simple calculator, it w…

I was a huge fan of Delphi 5 at the time, and hoped it would win over VB6 (I guess it's a Coke/Pepsi thing). Now I'm in the same boat as you, because it seems both Delphi and its competitor, VB, have lost. I'm not even sure if there are any winners. I wish someone would build a robust OS & GUI toolkit and ship it with developer tools...

Have a look at Lazarus (http://www.lazarus.freepascal.org/), which is basically Delphi 7 in a cross-platform open source version. It's not as stable as I'd like it to be, and some components are still missing, but it works well enough to be a more than viable alternative to '98 VB 6.

Re: The Microsoft Empire Reboots

#94

Post by UnoriginalGuy »

alex_hitchins wrote: post #28
gurkendoktor wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was a huge fan of Delphi 5 at the time, and hoped it would win over VB6 (I guess it's a Coke/Pepsi thing). Now I'm in the same boat as you, because it seems both Delphi and its competitor, VB, have lost. I'm not even sure if there are any winners. I wish someone would build a robust OS & GUI toolkit and ship it with developer tools...

I cut my teeth with VB 5/6. I still think there is nothing on the market that is as fast in creating applications. If you did things properly (MVP! remember that?) it was quite maintainable. I still know of several VB apps still in service.

VB6 supported classes, [standard] modules, and forms if I remember correctly. So while on paper it would possible to do things properly I'd say that was more the exception than the rule.

The main problem with VB6 was the modules. Modules were "any code here is thrown into the global scope" areas. Worse still they would execute with the caller's context, so you could mix in things like form logic (which would break if the form wasn't the caller).

This sounds great to newbies: "Ohh nice I'll just write a bunch of helper procedures/functions, throw them into a module and use them all over!"

However as projects grew so would the global scope of the application. You then have module function A which calls procedure B, and so on. So when it comes time to refactor some of this global craft into nice streamline classes it is pure hell as the application was never written with that in mind.

MVP in VB6 is largely a myth. I've never seen a legit VB6 application written in that style, and I've only seen it in context of articles talking about how things SHOULD be done. You want something like MVP? Then pick up a framework which enforces it or it won't happen.

Re: The Microsoft Empire Reboots

#95

Post by UnoriginalGuy »

wernercd wrote: post #64
alex_hitchins wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I cut my teeth with VB 5/6. I still think there is nothing on the market that is as fast in creating applications. If you did things properly (MVP! remember that?) it was quite maintainable. I still know of several VB apps still in service.

If you do things properly, PHP is maintainable... C is maintainable... The problem is "properly" is surrounded by a lot of people who slap stuff together, reinvent the wheel (NIH syndrome) or just plain don't know how to program. I shudder when I look at old VB code... and thank God that I have VS2013, resharper and C#. I think the issue people have is "it's never as good as it used to be". You remember the good, for…

I really like Resharper but had to uninstall it.

I have an i7, 16 GB RAM machine (with a 7,200 RPM HDD though), and when I had Resharper running Visual Studio 2013 would take 10+ seconds longer to load and lag horribly every time I opened a large class.

I tried all of their repair tips, but ultimately I think it it is just that laggy and slow by its nature and drags Visual Studio down with it.

I just couldn't justify the $149/year (effectively, due to the way upgrades work) cost. Plus Visual Studio 14 CTP adds many of Resharpers features natively and without any lag at all.

Re: The Microsoft Empire Reboots

#96

Post by chrisabrams »

taway2012 wrote: post #81
chrisabrams wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hey, I just started as Director of Engineering at VanityFair, and I can definitely agree with you our site is in much need of a UX overhaul. We are working to address the points you made plus may more issues that affect the site.

Hopefully the redesign won't give us light gray text on a white background, which seems to the rage these days. :) I had zero problems reading the print version.

Haha! It's definitely #000 on #fff. The design is very clean; on mobile it's almost as clean as the readability function on iOS.

Re: The Microsoft Empire Reboots

#97

Post by ScottBurson »

HillRat wrote: post #89
bambax wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This rings true. I had some relations with Microsoft last year and it's incredible how inward-looking they are. They spend most of the time telling you how great everything Microsoft-like is or will be, and don't seem to be well aware of the outside world. They know there are things like iPhones and Android devices, but they appear truly baffled that anyone would want one. They think it's some kind of conspiratory re…

Yeah, the coldest summer I ever spent in Seattle was hauling an iPad around meetings at Redmond. One L69 had this very pointed way of staring at the tablet, then at the big red clock, then back again. Keep in mind, I was part of a team coming in as a prospective customer . Just very weird. I still have hopes for Nadella -- maybe just because I'm an old Sun warhorse -- but it's going to require a big rethink of MSFT,…

> the coldest summer I ever spent in Seattle was hauling an iPad around meetings at Redmond

> [from the article] “[Ballmer's] view was that anyone in the company who used the iPhone was a traitor,” says this person. “His dad worked for Ford, and that meant you had Ford in your garage.”

This attitude drives me nuts. The best thing Ford and GM could have done in 1985 would have been to buy Civics and Corollas for 10% of their employees so they could see for themselves what was so good about them. But no, instead they had this adolescent "be true to your school" thing going on.

The same clearly applies to Microsoft. I hope Nadella gets that business is not a repeat of high school.

Re: The Microsoft Empire Reboots

#98

Post by eldavido »

monstermonster wrote: post #70
david927 wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you're right, and it's a huge indictment. The web, as an application platform, is worse than VB ever was. Think about that for a moment: We've regressed from VB. The usual tradeoff is: easy to write, hard to extend and maintain. But the web is hard to write and hard to extend/maintain. We have some of the smartest people in the world in our industry, and evidently we're all idiots.

This, a million times. I'm a bit further down the abstraction chain but I am thoroughly glad I sit there all day writing C/C++ for Windows native (win32) GUI applications. I know once I've tested it on one machine it's going to work fine on all the other ones. It's the most stable API and platform I've ever seen. Code we wrote for Windows NT4 works fine on Windows 8.1 and behaves exactly the same. Compare that to our…

I used to work at Microsoft (SQL Server). It goes without saying, but getting here is an intentional, conscious thing Microsoft spends billions of dollars to achieve.

Working in SF in earlier-stage companies, I've never seen anything even close to the rigor with which Microsoft approached testing. Definitely consider working there if you want to learn from some of the best QA/QE/verification engineers in the industry.

Re: The Microsoft Empire Reboots

#99

Post by eldavido »

WoodenChair wrote: post #90
monstermonster wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This, a million times. I'm a bit further down the abstraction chain but I am thoroughly glad I sit there all day writing C/C++ for Windows native (win32) GUI applications. I know once I've tested it on one machine it's going to work fine on all the other ones. It's the most stable API and platform I've ever seen. Code we wrote for Windows NT4 works fine on Windows 8.1 and behaves exactly the same. Compare that to our…

I completely agree with you guys. The tone deafness in this thread with regards to why VB6 appealed to beginners is striking. No, beginners don't want to layout things in CSS, a declarative XML language, or any other 'text' way. They want to drag and drop components with the sort of ease of use that Visual Studio or Interface Builder offer. And they want a language coupled with that which features the simplicity of P…

Which makes you wonder, could you bolt a language like Python onto an interface builder a la Xcode IB, Visual Studio Forms designer, etc?

I agree with you, I think the bigger picture here is how well the IDE, GUI, and code hang together as a complete unit; focusing on any in isolation (e.g. "VB sucks, use Python") misses the point.

Re: The Microsoft Empire Reboots

#100

Post by johan_larson »

melling wrote: post #36
gvb wrote: post #23

There is a Macintosh in the background of the picture "JUST KIDS Gates and former C.E.O. Steve Ballmer at Microsoft’s offices in Bellevue, 1985." Not unexpected given the date and the relationship between Apple and Microsoft at the time, but interesting that it shares the desk (albeit off in a corner) with the IBM-PC.

Microsoft was busy copying the Macintosh in 1985. Late in the year Windows 1.0 was released. http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_1.0

Microsoft has been supporting the Mac for a long time. Word 1.0 has run on the Mac since 1984. Some relationships are complicated.
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