Wait what...
Edit: There’s nothing wrong with being a JS developer. Heck, my main job is JS. My point is the choice of language hardly determines what kind of developer you are. I’ve seen great developers working on VBA and I’ve seen shitty developers working on C/C++ and Java.
To play devils advocate, I don’t think there are too many terrible developers working on Haskell and Rust though. Yet.
Those corps often like Microsoft, so that's what those devs work in.
He's not saying working in Microsoft technologies = not a good dev.
You say that like it's not still happening... VB6 is still the go-to tool at a certain blue cross and blue shield franchise - and probably at many others around the country. They post jobs(active postings right now) for .NET developers with VB6 experience. They do it under the guise to "help port existing applications", but in reality they are still developing new features with it, and will likely never stop.
http://vb.mvps.org/vfred/breaks.asp
It would have been entirely possible to make a CLR version of VB that was 99% compatible with VB6 -- and that's what they should have done. It would have given a clear upgrade path for a huge number of applications. Instead they just re-skinned C#.
Without backwards compatibility with VB6, there are no good parts of VB.NET. The Visual Basic syntax isn't that great to begin with and VB.NET then added more horrible keywords like `AndAlso` and `OrElse`.
In my opinion, most of that list isn't actually too bad. But it doesn't matter, all the horrors should have been included and then deprecated, giving a smooth upgrade path. Instead all VB6 code had to stay on VB6 as it was no where near 99% compatible. You have a language with different semantics, completely new way of building the UI, and superficial but incomplete syntax similarities. Anyone who was forced to rewrite, and was smart, went to C#.
Heavy Office users that have outgrown VBA and turn to VB.NET to keep doing their little department apps for data analysis without additional help from IT other than getting Visual Studio on their systems.
Also VB.NET gets all the tooling that C++ and C# get, not like the black swan in .NET, F#.
What’s an example of life sciences enterprises
Several examples to pick from.
that's the problem with the .NET front-end tools in general. They have no transition path to their previous version. VB6 to VB.NET is hard. WinForms to WPF is hard. WPF to UWP is a little better but still hard. Yes, they all still run but moving your project to the new shiny tech is very hard.
Since C# and VB.NET are essentially equivalent in capability, if you are a programmer with no .NET experience and a background in VB6 but not C/C++/Java, looking to rewrite an existing VB6 codebase for .NET, why would you go to hassle of additional unfamiliar syntax to go to C#?
> that's the problem with the .NET front-end tools in general. They have no transition path to their previous version. VB6 to VB.NET is hard.
VB6 to VB.NET is not a successive version of a .NET tool, front-end or otherwise.
That sounds obvious. Yet, the group I was in using VB6 thought VB.NET and what people were doing with it looked like it was going to be a bigger learning experience that wasn't just VB6 on a new VM. More like we would be learning a new language, libraries, and so on. So, some of us learned a new language, libraries, and so on with some extra benefits over another BASIC.
C, C++, Java, and C# are where everyone went among those I knew. Some of us kept using stuff with VB6, clones, and/or homebrew 4GL's that were BASIC-like. Most folks just put all that time and effort they perceived as necessary into a language that was a step up. Especially, career-wise.
Correct. But VB6 was the main tool for quick UI development before Winforms took that place. Things that would have been written with VB6 would be written in Winforms once it came out.
That industry is very old fashioned though - another good example is that every blue cross franchise uses the same software to process medicare/medicaid claims, and that software is powered by COBOL. At first it's shocking and you wonder how on earth things stay on the rails...but after a while you get used to it, a strange status quo.
Sort of like, in the modern day, it makes sense to use Go if the goal is to write an adapter that takes stuff from your database and pushes it out to some remote consumer that speaks ProtoBuf, and has a ready-to-use ProtoBuf schema.
That sounds like a small startup, too.
(I won't speak to the "average developers" and "mediocre managers" bit, though I assure you they're not unique to big enterprises.)
So I'm hacking away in a text editor, running a babel/webpack compile and bundle process that makes my Visual Studio solution builds seem instantaneous, firing up the app, hard-reloading the page a few times to make sure nothing is cached, then realizing I fucked something up or made a typo, and starting over. It's stupidly laborious and time-consuming. This is not progress.
For desktop and mobile there are a few RAD tools. Some of them: QT Creator, Windows Forms, Delphi, C++ Builder X, Mono.
Maybe some are not of the highest quality and maybe there's not enough RAD tools, but that's because many people think that "true" development happens only in VI and command line.
As someone already commented, a good RAD tool can save 90% percent of the time because you don't have to connect by hand signals, events with handlers and you don't have to draw the UI by code, unless you need something specific. Doing this tasks is a tedious and boring work, takes time that is better spent doing something else like working on the app logic.
I have ranted at length before on the reason that the Web is not amenable to RAD tooling. The short answer is that you have five different programming languages (HTML+JS+CSS+Python+SQL), with each component generating source code in another language, and that's impossible for a single development tool to manage sensibly.
To take one example: One of the best things about VB6 was autocomplete. But there's no sensible way to autocomplete what keys are in a JSON value that's been generated by a REST endpoint written in Python serving data from generated SQL, all with about 4-5 different frameworks in the way.
So for Anvil, we dispensed with that and did everything in one language (Python). Python on the front end, Python on the back-end, a Python-native database, a drag-and-drop designer producing UI components that are Python objects...and all of a sudden, it's all one representation and you can autocomplete it!
(I gave a talk about how the autocompleter works at PyCon UK a couple of years back: https://anvil.works/blog/python-autocompleter-pycon17)
It's sad because what developers are really doing here is wasting tons and tons of time. If we had really awesome modern and especially cross platform RAD tools the time savings would be enormous. We could spend that time working on more interesting stuff than wiring up controls to events.
This may be ok for a junior position, and in closed environment. However, people are lazy and not all people are hard core. As a result, there are a lot .NET senior who don’t actually “know” how to code. Nowadays things become extremely complicated, all sort of API, library and framework. Even Microsoft can’t provide a completed solution, and it go back to command line approach with .NET core. I have been recently contacted by my ex-employee who want me to do some C# API communication freelance because their .NET developers just don’t know how to read the documentation and implement them in code.
Can you put a WinForms app into the Microsoft Store? UWP apps having a marketplace to sell them is kind of a point in their favour, even if it’s an entirely-artificial restriction Microsoft made up to push UWP.
The vast majority of the paid software I have consists of games that come from Steam or Gog. Steam really doesn't work well with UWP games, and the Gog stuff I have is mostly nicely packaged DosBox games from an earlier age.
My thinking is:
1. apps on the Windows Store have some level of sandboxing forced upon them, so I can rest assured that the Windows Store releases of these apps won’t make a mess of their computer, even after major-version updates. (Remember uTorrent?)
2. Windows Store apps get automatically updated in the background without ever running them—like apps installed via the OS package manager on Linux. Give some people any chance to cancel/delay an update, and they’ll do it, indefinitely. Better for most regular users [who aren’t relying on any reflexive professional workflows] to have their apps just “be” the newest version, at all times.
There is also some sort of vaguely-stated plan to allow totally unsandboxed win32 apps in the store at some point in the future but seems to specifically only apply to games.
https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/msix/desktop/deskto...
https://www.theverge.com/2019/5/30/18645609/microsofts-unive...
Enterprise is where you have average developers with mediocre managers and ill-formed specifications working to inadequate (but overrunning) budgets. Something gets nailed together to support the business, and once it's working you're never allowed to touch it again. The king of this kind of line-of-business app used to be VB6. There was a brief phase were people wrote intranet applications with embedded ActiveX controls and got permanently stuck on IE6. These days it's more likely to involve SAP or Sharepoint.
These customers made Microsoft a lot of money from all those desktops and Windows Server client access licenses, but they're extremely conservative.
And maybe they have a point; I can see what the advantage of UWP is for Microsoft, but as a developer it's not a clear win over WinForms.