I tend to agree. As far as VB and its impact (good and bad), I think it's really hard to understate it.
--- Puryear Information Technology, LLC Baton Rouge, LA * 225-706-8414 http://www.puryear-it.com Author: "Best Practices for Managing Linux and UNIX Servers" "Spam Fighting and Email Security in the 21st Century" Download your free copies: http://www.puryear-it.com/publications.htm Tuesday, October 10, 2006, 9:55:32 AM, you wrote: > In the context of a Slashdot article dealing with a student asking questions > of great programmers, the following question was asked of Linus Torvalds: > http://sztywny.titaniumhosting.com/2006/07/23/stiff-asks-great-programmers-answers/ > *"- What do you think will be the next big thing in computer programming? > X-oriented programming, y language, quantum computers, what?" > His response was as follows: > "* don't think we'll see a ?big jump". We've seen a lot of tools to help > make all the everyday drudgery easier - with high-level languages and > perhaps the integration of simple databases into the language being the main > ones. But most of the buzz-words have been of pretty limited use. > For example, I personally believe that ?Visual Basic" did more for > programming than ?Object-Oriented Languages" did. Yet people laugh at VB and > say it's a bad language, and they've been talking about OO languages for > decades. > And no, Visual Basic wasn't a great language, but I think the easy DB > interfaces in VB were fundmantally more important than object orientation > is, for example. > So I think there will be a lot of incremental improvements, and the hardware > improvements will make programming easier, but I don't expect any _huge_ > productivity help or revolutions in how people do things. > At least not until you start approaching real AI, and I don't think real AI > is going to be anything you will ever ?program" > This response is unbelievably telling. I'm floored.
