Stefano Lanzavecchia wrote:
are thousands of so-so C++ developers? A colleague of mine once had to write
a large and complex application in Excel using VBA. The first thing he did
was to build himself a library of APL-like functions and operators... Then
he wrote the add-in into this hybrid language. Unsurprisingly it was at the
same time efficient, relatively bug-free and readable. But when I showed
some people that it was possible to write rank-independent code in VB,
though it wasn't pretty, those people cringed in fear. Is it the language's
fault or the bad training?
I had similar experience, I was onced asked to help a friend to write a VB
program for assignment. The problem asked to filter a string array using 2
criteria. I wrote some utilities in VB to emulate array operation in J, finally
wrote equivelent of
f1=. V1 data NB. f1: boolean vector for criteria V1 is true
f2=. V2 data NB. f2: boolean vector for criteria V2 is true
res=. (f1*.f2)#data NB. select according to both criteria met.
I think this was quite simple, but the university's instructor gave the
assignment a fail and commented he had never saw a worse program before. His
comment was an entertainment to me but not to my friend. sorry to my friend.
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