Bruce Bruen
bbruen at bigpond.com
Fri Aug 1 07:45:33 CDT 2003
Scott and List, On re-reading the whole of the thread, it is I who should apologise. Recently, I have been reviewing technology choices for a friend who is embarking on a new product development. As it involves a base of multiple database flavours and internet deployment of the finished app he was interested in the development "issues" of various languages with view to understanding his risks if he chose one or more off the newer offerings. We looked at .net (VB, ASP and C#), php (and pear), ruby, Kylix, Delphi, Java and python. Somehow, I lost the central issue of the AccessD thread and gave vent to my frustrations with the "bells and whistles" marketing disinformation that goes with the currently avialable literature on the commercial languages. In short, I plead "toxic feature overload", m'lud. Or perhaps, as Lloyd Bridges said in Flying High, "I guess I picked the wrong week to give up sniffing glue". Regarding C#, and given that I have only given it a cursory look as I will explain, we were singularly unimpressed. According to a very technical and ex-M$ acquaintance, C# still retains the the dangerous features of C++, notably no array bound limiting, pointer arithmetic and inadequate garbage collection. These, IMHO, are total no-no's in a business application development language. This was a point I quite unadmirably did not make in that rave, so I apologise for losing my own way in that respect. Some may argue that these "features" are strenghts of C. For a mainstream business application development, I disgree. They well may have uses in extremely technical coding situations, like operating systems, DBMS engines, device drivers and even embedded devices. But not in mainstream business application development. They are, as far as I'm concerned as a development manager interested in reducing risk and lowering maintenance costs, the equivalent of the 1970's GOTO. Given those comments from the technical man, and the previous separate and joint experiences of both my client and myself in C++ development shops (both of us having experienced never-never delivery schedules and delivery of code with incredibly expensive maintenance costs), C# was the first cull. Note VB.net and ASP.net are both still in the race. As are the Borland and non-commercial languages. So, again I apologise for hijacking the thread, and also apologise for the latish apology. I have just landed another gig and took a quick day off - fishing - before starting work. This time its development of a RAD methodology - hmmm - should keep me off the rant for a few months at least, so we'll just have to wait for JC's return (second coming????) Bruce <snip>... -----Original Message----- From: Marcus, Scott (GEAE, Contractor) [mailto:scott.marcus at ae.ge.com] Sent: Thursday 2003 Jul 31 07:48 To: 'Access Developers discussion and problem solving' Subject: RE: [AccessD]OT: C# was no-ip.com Bruce, I reread my post and am offering an apology for sounding rude. The discussion is interesting, I just wish it had a different subject line. Scott _______________________________________________ AccessD mailing list AccessD at databaseadvisors.com http://databaseadvisors.com/mailman/listinfo/accessd Website: http://www.databaseadvisors.com