Guido Van Rossum’s responses are funny, insightful, and concise. I don’t see them as rude.
The egg comment obviously means that the most important skill for a programmer is to be able to take good care of himself or herself, versus paying others to make breakfast. It may also mean that Van Rossum thinks there isn’t a single most important programming skill, which is obvious but doesn’t stop bloggers from speculating.
And the snowboarding comment probably just means that he thinks snowboarding is interesting.
“Have to agree with Jeff. Guido did come across as a jerk.”
Dude gave me the stink-eye just for walking past him at OSCON (I guess). I saw his name badge, never heard of him before. I recognized him as a fashion disaster, shorts pulled up to his arm pits, black socks pulled up to mid-shin with sandals. Wearing a black Google t-shirt. I thought, “Damn brudda, you got all that Google money and that’s the best you can dress yourself. Sad.”. Check the Flckr tag OSCON and see for yourself.
The point Linus is trying to make is that VB was one of the first popular languages that actually attempted to simplify common operations related to disconnected data, among other things. This has “inspired” other languages such as gasp Ruby.
And ADO.NET isn’t any less abstract that VB’s database access is.
Guido? A jerk? I’ve never met the guy, so I don’t know, but he seemed like he was using the sort of brevity that comes from a lack of time and undertrained English-speaking skills.
Anybody know if that’s true? Is Guido weak in the English department?
you can’t underestimate the usefulness of VB in microsoft office: especially excel. I agree it produces some ameaturish results, but then who cares - the programmers that are bothered are doing far greater and better things
None of them seemed anywhere near a “jerk” IMHO. If anything, I’d go with humorous.
With the questions set out, it is easy to see how one could be a little confused by the responses as the questions themselves were too open ended (with the exception of the books questions of course, and even then, there were no specifics (i.e. “What is your favourite book related to computer programming?” - the answer would depend on the programmer and his/her choice of language))
How the hell do you people think that VB predates Delphi? Are you insane. VB is a relatively modern programming language. Delphi, however, is a city of Phocis in mainland Greece that lies in the vale of the river Pleistus, and is shut on one side by Mount Parnassus.
Guido doesn’t come across as a jerk! He comes across as a level-headed uber-geek who doesn’t play the hype game! And good for him, too! Andy Hunt and David Thomas, on the other hand, come across as the wanabees they are. Go Python!
My utmost sympathy to posters above who aim at Mr van Rossum’s fashion sense and yet have absolutely no idea how Python powers the most popular search engines and yet schoolchildren find easier to learn than VB. I feel very sorry for you lot, very, very sorry.
What most programmers who are passionate about their language of choice forget is that ultimately it does not matter what is used. They are all ultimately compiled down to the microcodes that actually run on the final processor. It is, as Torvalds understands, the final product that is important. The end user does not care, as long as the job gets done. In my years of programming it is ease of use of the interface that is king, not the tape and string that holds it together.
One final thing, FORTRAN pretty much predates the lot. It is why every programmer uses i, j, k etc, as loop variables.
@Andrew:
I have used VB6 as a non-programmer entering the software development industry, for my postgraduate projects. I can tell you that “ease of use of the interface” was definitely not one of VB6’s strong points. Heck, it was scary to use the cluttered interface and I had to scale my windows every now and then just to see the hidden parts of the IDE.
@Jeff:
BTW, Linus’ quote on “easy database interfaces in VB” is not true. I’ve had nightmares with just copying VB code from one Windows machine to another (for student project presentations) and getting it to connect to Access. I think the problems were largely MDAC connections. If “easy database interfaces” was the point Linus was trying to make, I’d disagree and say that PHP/MySQL development on a Knoppix CD saving files to a USB drive (or a XAMPP installation in Windows) would top VB development any day, because it’s true.
However, the thing that VB (v6, in my experience) really excels (ha, Excel, geddit :P) at–to paraphrase Joel Spolsky–is the relative speed one can get a desktop app prototype interface (for useability purposes) out of the door for a manager who doesn’t care about how the underlying code works. I can say the same about Flash (via Components), but for cross-browser (meaning IE/Firefox) XHTML, JS and CSS, it takes a lot longer to get the same effect.
Simon, just a point of clarification, I was not talking about the VB IDE, which as you point out has some major shortcomings. I was talking about the final application’s user interface.
“Maybe? Of course we should. The more I talk to other developers, the more I tire of their childish one-upmanship and snobbery. So you write everything in LISP and have memorised lots of algorithms? Great, but you take months to write buggy code which no-one else can read, no-one’s sure whether you understood the spec correctly (you didn’t) because you’re unable to talk to humans and yes, it does look like you shaved 10 microseconds off a 3 hour process by spending 2 days rewriting part of the compiler. Congratulations.”
This is the writing of a non-programmer, of that I’m pretty certain.
This person fits somewhere along the line between the security guard and the buzzwordy project manager - you know, non-technical staff, maybe a bit intellectually insecure, maybe paid too much to be a burden at their company (ie middle-management).
I have always loved the Borland naming humor (as I understand it).
AIUI “123” was named so accountants could locate the keys to enter the program name. So Borland picked Quattro Pro (qp.exe) - letters at each end of top alpha row. That must have been too hard, so it was later shortened to q.exe.
Delphi - Why did one go to Delphi? To consult an Oracle.
Ummm, stretching much? Yeah, I would say so. Just because there is something good to say about a subject doesn’t make the entire subject good. If someone wrote a terrible program that wouldn’t even compile and another person complimented their use of white space that still doesn’t mean the program works.
As far as Guido’s answers go, I think they answer the questions very well. The problem is that the questions themselves are very inspecific. I suspect that under circumstances like these if he had been asked what time it was he would likely say “Where?”. I honestly think he was being nice when he didn’t say “breathing” in response to the second question.
Now I’m going to go ahead and not read any more of this blog. It is, as far as I have seen, invariably uninformed, illogical, and poorly written.
