

Is Ruby the New VB? - chaostheory
http://tssblog.blogs.techtarget.com/2007/10/30/is-ruby-the-new-vb/

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jey
The difference is that ruby doesn't suck.

~~~
henning
Visual Basic 6 was innovative for its time - garbage collection, limited
dynamic typing, foreach-style iteration. It compiled to bytecode and ran
reasonably efficiently.

VBA works very well for its intended purpose, which is creating simple macros
for Word and Excel. The idea of systematically ensuring that there was a 1:1
match between what you could do by hand and what you could automate with VBA
rather than only exposing a limited subset of the program to an extension
language is a pretty good one, and a substantial part of the reason there's no
way in hell a hardcore Excel user would switch over to any of the web-based
spreadsheet gadgets out there.

But, yes, programming in pre-.NET Visual Basic (which is really just C# with
Basic-style syntax) is pretty infuriating, because the hard stuff is not hard,
it's impossible.

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plinkplonk
I think the measure of "VBness" of a language may not be so much the intrinsic
qualities of a language as the calibre of the programmers it attracts. I think
VB was (is? ) considered an atrocious language because the average user of VB
was, rightly or wrongly, seen to be a "mord" who knew next to nothing of
programming and wanted to drag and drop and click his way to project success.

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vlad
I think CakePHP is the new VB since you can easily install VB6 on any Windows
computer and make apps for (at the time) 95% of computers (and for Parallels
now as well), just like PHP apps run on almost any existing web host. Also
like VB6, CakePHP apps are based on a very simple language (BASIC versus PHP)
while Ruby is different in some ways than languages most programmers are
familiar with. Finally, CakePHP and VB6 both evolved from very popular
languages used by hundreds of thousands of people for many years (BASIC,
QBASIC, regular PHP), while almost nobody used Ruby before Ruby on Rails came
along.

Finally, on all three points, I'm comparing and contrasting Ruby on Rails.
Ruby itself is nowhere near Visual Basic--QBasic might be a better comparison.

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carpal
No. In Ruby, array indices start at 0.

~~~
brent
There's nothing wrong with starting indices at 1 (or n).

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DarrenStuart
in short no, the thing that made vb popular was it RAD stuff. Ruby on its own
does not have windowing etc. Then again maybe it is when you look at the
uptake of it. I still think people miss the point of vb and get far to elitist
about whatever their fav language. why would I write a 5000 line C program
when I could do it in a 1000 a lot quicker? If the end result is the same
nothing is lost by doing it in vb. I live by use the best tool for the job.

~~~
michaelneale
Whilst no IDE style tooling, rails is kind of a "RAD" (non visual) tool for
classic style web apps. What with all the scaffolding and only writing the
minimal code to deal with actions etc.

So perhaps rails is the new VB would be more fair.

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qaexl
I've been writing Rails apps for a while. While I still use scaffolding, I
almost always start changing them after I generate it it. A lot of the better
Rails dev on #rubyonrails write their stuff from scratch. People who want to
take scaffolding to something more capable usually use a plugin such as
ActiveScaffold.

If you want to point to anything "RAD" in Rails, it is the ActiveRecord ORM,
and more recently, the RESTful controllers.

Hanging out on #rubyonrails, there are a lot of Rails newcomers who come into
the channel with little or no programming background, or those that do, come
in without having first learned Ruby. They expect to be able to have Rails do
the work for them, but Rails doesn't replace the need for a programmer to be
able to think. Even a highly expressive language will have difficulty helping
someone who has nothing to express.

~~~
michaelneale
sounds a bit similar to VB - although of course it was (deliberately) a far
less capable language, it still had the same issue of people expecting just to
sprinkle a "little code" behind the scenes and have it work.

My (distant) memory of most RAD tools of the 90s was similar to scaffolding -
in some cases it could get you started but for any reasonable app, you tended
to build stuff up by hand or dynamically etc.

I still think it bears a lot of similarity. Now with Sun and MS "blessing"
ruby as a glue language, it seems even more likely to follow a similar path,
for better and worse.

~~~
qaexl
Maybe so.

I'm fully anticipating the day when an entire generation of non-US kids who
grew up with the OLPC XO, and expect Python and Squeak to be in "grown up"
computers.

Ruby is like a Japanese stone garden or a bonsai tree. Maybe it'll stay weird
and Japanese enough to keep the tourists from stumbling in drunk, late at
night.

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michaelneale
In more ways then one I think this is true. VB was never powerful enough to
implement itself though, not sure about ruby (time will tell).

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chaostheory
to me Ruby is what Sun always wanted - a simple language (ideally running on
the Java VM) that would lure away all those disgruntled VB programmers away
from MS... too bad they focused their initial attention on Groovy. Times have
changed

