Chris Benatar wrote:
<snipped>
>I am sure that OO.o software is some of the best written code around
>but it seems that not enough thought and effort has been given to the
>overall concepts and target groups. I am well aware that the choice of
>language was largely determined by the huge influence of Sun
>Microsystems which is to be expected, but the problem however still
>remains - you are throwing gibberish (from the users perspective) at
>the users and they run away.
>
>
>
Just found this thread. Better late than never.
I completely agree. I've spent literally days agonising over scripts
that would have taken my 5 minutes in VB & Word / Excel. For example I
made a script that pulls data from a database, based on data entered in
a dialog, and dumps it into a text document. It took multiple attempts (
between which I gave up and swore never to return ) and probably 5 days
( combined work ) of frigging around to get it to work.
I've since decided that anything needing Macros needs MS Office.
Everything else can use OpenOffice. For database apps, I've rolled my
own solution with Gtk2-Perl.
If people want OOBasic to get some traction, it *needs* to be easy to do
things like:
Range( ActiveCell, ActiveCell.Offset(5,10) ).Select
Selection.Copy
Sheet("SomeSheet").Activate
ActiveSheet.Paste
If people have to refer to use 10x the code and refer to garbage like:
com.sun.star on every line, then they're just not going to use it.
Perhaps someone should set up a study similar to the usage studies that
compare tasks under Word & OO Writer ... but instead of getting
end-users to do some formatting and a mail merge, get some programmers
to do something like the above ( or the parent's post ). The simple fact
is that most people don't care how much cooler OOBasic is than VB, or
how much more you can do, or how much better designed it is. Most people
just want to do simple scripting, and for that, OOBasic is the worst
language for the job. Even in my days of Cobol at uni, I've never been
so frustrated with a programming language, as when I was copying and
pasting values in OOBasic.
--
Daniel Kasak
IT Developer
NUS Consulting Group
Level 5, 77 Pacific Highway
North Sydney, NSW, Australia 2060
T: (+61) 2 9922-7676 / F: (+61) 2 9922 7989
email: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
website: http://www.nusconsulting.com.au
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