Oooh, calling out an anonymous coward who didn't even postulate anything... Edgy

Maybe chains to help keep her strange little cult of suffering well-populated.

Sure, why not? Pretending that drinking enough OJ will cure or prevent TB for the moment, it's possible that there would have been many more people with multidrug-resistant TB, but a glass of tasty juice stopped those other cases cold.

I get the incredulity, but 650,000 doesn't seem so big when you consider the population of the entire world.

I wouldn't say that. Neither would Linus Torvalds, as it turns out.

Not that it didn't have it's share of problems. (Of course, I would say the same for any language.) It certainly wasn't broken in some fundamental way. It's apparently fun to bash, but you'll find that most criticisms are either empty or pitifully shallow.

The REAL problem people have with VB is that it was absurdly easy to learn and use. This caused two problems:

  1) A Lot of crummy amateur code was produced that needed to be maintained by more experienced staff. That's not the fault of the language. Being easy to use is a good thing, after all! Of course, dealing with all that crummy code didn't exactly inspire a lot of good will from those who had to clean up the mess.

  2) As it was so simple that an absolute beginner could learn the basics of computer programming near instantly (and produce real, working, programs) it became a real threat to a large and vocal group of insecure developers. Believe it or not, some people actually believe that the ability to write computer programs requires a "special mind"! Having that skill makes them feel special, smart, and important. Having no other skills, they rightly felt threatened by VB. Never mind that half of Slashdot taught themselves to program between the ages of 8-12. (Hell, back in the 80's, computer programming as a hobby among pre-teens was so popular that there were tons of children's books that included type-in programs. Some, like the Magic Micro series, were targeted at early readers. Other books had type-ins that the reader had to modify or debug to solve the protagonist's problem and progress the story. There were many others aimed at teaching computer programming directly to the 8-12 set.) They've got a lot of their ego wrapped up in a skill that the average child can learn on their own VB, aimed at professionals, threatened more than their jobs; it threatened their ego. Can you really blame them for spreading FUD?

The remaining hate seems to come from the same kind of people who believe GOTO to be inherently evil. They don't really know why VB was horrible, only that "everyone" says that it is. It's an easy meme to put out there as they're likely to get a good bit of praise for their comments and unlikely to get much (if any) criticism for restating their borrowed opinion. It makes them feel like part of the community. It also makes them feel smart for holding the majority opinion, even though they didn't form it on their own.

This is something VB got right: distinguishing functions from subroutines. I don't know that it was ultimately helpful beyond the obvious pedagogical benefits, but it the distinction is valid and reasonable.

Even a blind squirrel gets a nut once in a while. Try as he might, he can't be wrong all the time.

Fail.

There are tons of them. Do a google search.

I only ask because I'm having trouble picturing him as the gigantic loser in the video showing off a toy train.

Yes, this is flamebait. That fact, however, doesn't negate the point nor make the weird-o in the video any less awkward.

Do you know any off-hand or can you find one or two?

That makes my point, doesn't it? To say that, under the best of circumstances, objects can sometimes be as efficient isn't much of a defense. (Let's not forget that you often trade far more than just performance for objects.)

No reasonable person would dispute the claim that objects have no business in code where performance is essential. I suspect that you'd agree with me here. That it's absurd to add objects to a language for no reason other than OO was the hot buzzword at the time (clearly ignoring all the research!) should be just as certain.

You wouldn't be alone, though that isn't a claim you'll find substantiated by the literature. (Though I've seen it inexplicably asserted a few times -- of course, the ACM is loaded with sloppy scholarship, as I'm sure you are all too painfully aware.)

I would strongly disagree with the claim as, in my experience, objects tend to be misused (in place of records, in place of proper modules, in place of libraries, in place of ...) and OO techniques tend to result in unnecessary complexity, unnecessary dependencies, bloat the code base ... I could go on.

Yes, I see the "properly used" qualifier, but you'll find that there's no general agreement about that either.

I'm glad I'm not still in the trenches.

Exactly.

It's also one of the many reasons you get such incredible performance out of COBOL.

Adding objects was a stupid marketing-driven mistake.

Ridiculous.

RIM's BlackBerry killed the PDA market. They were long dead before the iPhone was even a rumor.

As for the merging of PDA and cell phone, A Handspring Visor + VisorPhone Springboard module from 2001 is, well, a lot like an iPhone. To see the failure of a product like the Newton (a poor dynabook imitation) as pioneering is to ignore a lot of history.

Not from a UI design perspective. From the ridiculously clunky suite of gestures to the overloaded home button, the iPhone UI is a giant pile of failure. It succeeds at doing very few simple, but common, tasks well: selecting an application and quitting the same. It's a gigantic mess from that point on.

I'll grant you "responsive" but the display was average at best -- and quickly became one of the worst on the market due to some really stupid UI decisions on Apple's part.

I love the "mainstream" qualifier here -- with a subjective term like that, you'll never be wrong. Ignoring the long history of multitouch and the incredibly poor use of multitouch gestures in iOS (poor then, worse now), are you sure that's a place you want to praise Apple?

Apples on-screen keyboard is exactly what you found on low-end PDAs 10 years ago. I should note that Apple's keyboard was, and continues to be, one of the worst on the market. I don't know that I've ever seen anyone defend it against the (clearly superior) alternatives past and present.

Sure about that? You're giving Bonch, BasilBrush, and SuperKendall a run for the biggest Apple fanboi title here.

Revisionist history

Over the past few weeks, it seems like some evangelist comes along every 10 minutes to let use know that salvation is right around the corner.

The trouble, of course, is that their lowest price was higher than the previous lowest price.