Linked by Takuya Murata on Tue 18th May 2004 06:26 UTC
My physics teacher likes to say that physics like to make problems they face look like ones that they know how to solve. A simple harmonic oscillation was one he frequently used in class, as is presumably the case in physics in general.
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Only because *other* people took the effort to program the components you use in a more difficult programming language.
Why is using scripting languages more productive?
Because you reuse a lot of stuff others made for you, and because you're allowed to take short cuts. And that means you're able to program without having to think as much about what you will be programming.
So that might also be the drawback with more 'detailed' languages (call them low-level, whatever), you can't make as many short-cuts, so you have to think more about how you will acomplish something up-front.
But it also means that the quality of your code can be much higher. If you take the right approach. If you don't take the time and effort, your code will be crap and you'd better be off programming VB.
Maybe that's why people like Java and C# so much: you get a language that is suitable for detailed programming, but still a huge library you can use.
Oh by the way, in VB you're extremely dependent on the quality of the components you use. If they're crap, then your productivity will sink like a stone. I think all VB programmers can remember a time that a component should've done domething and it just didn't work. And your 2 days estimate suddenbly became a 3 week 18hr a day pizza-eating effort.
I see this as reaching a difficulty point. With Java, everything takes more effort from the start, but when your project grows and gets more complicated, the effort of programming stays the same, or even gets lower if you know what you're doing.
With VB you can do a lot with little effort, but you can suddenly get to the point that you have to do impossible things just to get something working.
Every language has it's pros and cons. The trick is to use the right tool for the job.
Oh btw, in a certain sense I think the writer of the article is right. Maybe the fact that we still use similar languages *has* to do with upbringing. As a programmer with experience in C/C++/Java/ObjC/Pascal/VB I find it difficult to learn a programming language which has a very different syntax, or a really different approach, like functional languages.
It's like the shift form procedural to OO, or lineair to event-driven, or AOP. Hard to get your head around, but when you make the shift, it takes no effort at all anymore.