Woah! I thought that the J2EE guys knew how to build enterprise applications, but apparently that's just a myth. Check out the “Five Eights” expose by Rick Ross, founder of JavaLobby.
The ironic thing is, I've been beating on Microsoft for 2 years to develop a Resource Kit (as opposed to an SDK) for .NET and never managed to get anywhere. Maybe after Microsoft is done addressing Security they can apply the same emphasis to RAS (Reliability, Availability, Serviceability). An acronym, by the way, that I happen to remember being drilled into me as a new IBM salesman more than 20 years ago.
...And He Is Us“ (Walt Kelly, 1970 Earth Day poster)
A ton of response to my “Future of VB” post. Some good stuff (I particularly liked Duncan's idea that the tool handle converting the language seemlessly). But there's also a fair amount of stuff like IM's comment that “Programmers use C# and VB to write the same kind of programs” that I have a hard time agreeing with. Sure, some of these are the same, but if this is really true then is there really a point in having two languages?
It's hard to accept. It's been my - obviously simplistic - opinion that C# guys would rather spend their time polishing some elegant class library or widget while the VB guy would rather solve a business problem. Sure, the VB guy might need to create some classes (most don't, except by accident) and the C# guy might create a user interface (though, arguably, he shouldn't be encouraged ).
Here's the problem: We (the VB programmer) have become the “enemy“. This was brought home to me earlier this week when I was talking to a couple of people who are known guru programmers. They were lamenting the looming demise of programming as a paying profession and trying to figure out where they might move their careers. The problem is, they both like solving engineering problems: They both _like_ coding.
I volunteered that I agreed, and that with the next major generation of tools putting the code generation in the tool / compiler, that this would herald the triumphant return of the VB programmer who glued together a bunch of stuff to actually get something done. But I was skewered by the guru who said “Obviously, but that's not going to be you. You're actually one of us now. It's going to be a bunch of new people we don't know.”
And he was right. In the process of making the VB programmer into a computer science wannabe, we've lost site of the original reward of VB, which was that it enabled non-programmers to actually solve problems. Many of us made a decent living teaching these guys to be productive, but you sure don't see any of that “learn to write business applications in 5 days” stuff applied to .NET.
In one of the coments to my post about the future of VB, Leon Bambrick wrote
“*real** microsoft coders write everything in IL. “
Reminds me of a quote I recall from Steve Ciarcia (the Circuit Cellar Ink guy) who said:
“real programmers use solder.“