🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <Pine.LNX.4.21.0207281930170.24694-100000@smarty.smart.net>, "Paul O. Bartlett" <bartlett@smart.net> wrote:
>On 28 Jul 2002, Mike Mitchell wrote:
>
>> This is a really BIG gripe with me. The fact that Microsoft develops a
>> product over six versions in eleven years, builds up a huge market
>> following (over three million VB programmers), then just pulls the
>> product in favour of a replacement that has about as much in common
>> with it as summer does to winter, really makes me angry! [...]
>>                               This is simply shocking that a company
>> can just dictate to the marketplace in such a cavalier fashion. VB6
>> has the potential for many small to medium programming tasks for many
>> years to come, yet Microsoft wants all developers to move to the .Net
>> way of doing things, i.e. more bloatware.
>
>    Those of us who have been around a while remember when IBM was the
>big duck in the puddle.  For a long time they pretty much told the
>marketplace to go hang.  "Standards?  What do you mean, standards?  We
>are IBM.  That's all we need to say."  Look at EBCDIC.  The rest of the
>world went ASCII (with 8-bit extensions), but on their mainframes, IBM
>insisted on EBCDIC, which was used by nobody else except the
>plug-compatible manufacturers like Amdahl.  In the early days of the
>internet, at least, the EBCDIC-ASCII incompatibility caused problems
>with data integrity at some gateways.  Eventually even gawd-almighty
>IBM had to come down off their high horse (although their mainframes
>still use EBCDIC, as far as I know).  The same may happen sooner or
>later to Microsoft.  But I admit that in the meantime it is
>frustrating.  However, Linux may give MS a run for their money if
>enough high-quality commercial software can be written for it.

On the question of EBCDIC, I assume this is an "improved" or extended 
version of Binary Coded Decimal?  If so, then isn't it possible that 
IBM was committed to its use for all sorts of commercial reasons?  In 
particular, and most importantly, so financial and other arithmetic 
calculations could be done *precisely* without the problems and 
potential confusions of rounding errors.

As for VB6, I've never used it.  My own "programming tasks" are 
usually done in GWBASIC or QBasic or, if it's a bit more complex and I 
think I might use the code again, in PDS7.1. 8-)   However, I 
certainly sympathise with Mike's gripe.  It really seems like MS has 
abandoned the "private programmer" completely.  Frankly, I've no use 
for stuff that can program my toaster to interrogate your fridge to 
see if there's any marmalade left.


Cheers, Phred.

-- 
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