The Static Page

Visual BASIC and other horrors.

I could have scored some pretty good jobs a few months ago if I was a hard-core Visual BASIC programmer. When I was looking in the IT section of the paper, there seemed to be a distinct surpless of positions for VB programmers. It was very annoying.

Unfortunately, programming in Visual BASIC is a much desired skill by certain types of IT shops. It fits in well in largely Microsoft environments because it's been adapted and extended for all sorts of situations. But it has it's problems. Significantly, it's still a procedural language trying to pretend to be an object-oriented language. In this, it's hampered by a lot of old BASIC baggage and the complex and convoluted object hierarchy that ActiveX brings to the table. Having learnt Icon some years ago, Visual BASIC in all it's modern incarnations is utterly pathetic.

Okay, that's a pet peeve. It was the seemingly inordinate numbers of positions for VB programmers that bugged me.

But other things could be said to infest IT. Leaving aside Windows in it's various incarnations for as long as you can, what else do you find crufty yet seemingly everywhere? Is it the idiotic Windows key on modern keyboards? Is it locked-down desktops? Is it colour inkjet printers with tri-colour cartridges? Is it Windows 98 on new PCs - whoops, I said put that aside, didn't I? :-)

Wade Bowmer, aka Static.

Comments? Email me at static dash page at yceran dot org.