> >Some of the stuff above is my opinion. Some of it is the opinion our
> >target market will have. For example, personally, I rather like Perl,
> >but its syntax is patently absurd for a target market which includes
> >people like my Dad, or people like the VB crowd.
> >
>
> Would you care to explain this claim?
> Personally, I find Perl much more intuitive and easy to read than VB.
> (If it's done well.)
In matters of opinion, there will always be people on both sides.
The assertion that Perl is easier to read than VB is really gutsy, and
I admire you for the courage it must have taken to defend that stance.
It motivates me to take an act of similar courage, and start claiming
that Bill Clinton has a higher ethical standard than Billy Graham.
:-)
Sorry, I really should not ridicule your point of view like that.
However, I want to reflect to you that very few non-programmers will
ever share your point of view on this matter.
Can I assume that you are indeed a programmer (as I am)? If so,
please remember that you and I are very different from normal people.
True programmers learn new languages at the drop of a hat. We don't
understand why people think C and pascal are so different. After all,
they are nearly identical to each other when compared to say, Prolog,
right? We don't stress about delimiters, operator precedence, or the
semicolons.
On the other hand, non-programmers, including many of the people who
write VB macros in Excel, live with a different world view. Learning
a new language is very taxing for them. Languages like Basic are
really friendly, because they are a little more like English. Extra
syntax, such as $_, is very intimidating. Furthermore, the use of
Basic, and Basic-like languages tends to snowball, since learning it
once pays off for such a wide variety of products. Visual Basic is
very similar to Lotus Script, for example. Companies know this, and
they choose languages like Basic specifically because it helps reduce
the pain of the learning curve for the non-programmers of the world,
who are in fact the target market for their products.
AbiSuite really wants to be flexible enough to meet many needs.
However, if push comes to shove, AbiSuite is being designed for
non-programmers, not for people like you or I.
