April 2006 Entries
For a long time, I’ve been trying to write an entry entitled “I Hate Mort” that captures everything that I think is wrong with the current “Mort, Elvis, Einstein” taxonomy of developers that Visual Studio uses. And, for a long time, I’ve been failing miserably. I think it’s that I tend to want to be very fair-minded on the subject—by and large, people are extremely well-meaning when they talk about Mort and Visual Basic, and I feel bad bad-mouthing something that a lot people have invested a good chunk of thought into. However, Scott Bellware has no such qualms:
The Microsoft...
At the end of his entry on the concatenation operator, Bill observes some strange behavior around types that have a user-defined conversion to String but can’t be used with the concatenation operator. This is actually a design bug in our operator overloading resolution logic that we’re planning on fixing, since it won’t impact compatibility at all. To quote almost verbatim from the preliminary spec I wrote on it:
Consider the following program:
Module Module1
Sub Main()
Dim CI As New C()
' Error: '&' is not defined for 'String' and 'C'
Console.WriteLine(CI & "world")
Dim S As String...
Erik Meijer has posted an announcement for Lang .NET 2006, a Microsoft-sponsored language conference, over on Lambda the Ultimate that I thought I would point out to any readers who might be interested. A bit of the announcement:
Lang .NET 2006 is a forum for discussion of programming languages, managed execution environments, compilers, multi-language libraries, and integrated development environments. It provides an excellent opportunity for programming language implementers and researchers from both industry and academia to meet and share their knowledge, experience, and suggestions for future research and development in the area of programming languages.
Lang.NET 2006 will be held from...
Because it’s much less likely that some a**hole is going to come in to your office and steal your ShipIt awards. So far I’ve recieved eight product boxes, and four of them have been stolen out of my office. Three of them (VB 6.0, VB 2002 and VB 2003) disappeared out of my office sometime in the last week. What possible benefit anyone could get from old product boxes is beyond me…
(More context on this entry can be found here.)
Over on his blog John Montgomery shares how some of Microsoft’s internal research puts the lie to the old canard that VB programmers aren’t as smart as other programmers. A short quote:
If you ask VB developers how much education they have, about the same have college degrees as C/C++ developers (we ask what their primary language is and cross reference by level of education attained), and only negligibly more C/C++ developers have graduate degrees. More than that, more pro developers who primarily use VB say they have an undergrad CS degree than pro developers who use C/C++ primarily (though more...
I was on a thread today where a VB MVP asked if VB was ever going to integrate regular expression-type functionality directly into the language to make it easier (and more comprehensible) to work with strings. The immediate reaction in my head was, “Well, it’s in the pipeline, but no telling if it’ll ever come out…” Which bears a little explanation…
The traditional model for software development at Microsoft is something I’d call “punctuated insanity.” That is, you start a product version by running around like a chicken with your head cut off, trying to come up with what you think you should...
There is a saying that “no one is more zealous than a convert,” and I think Erik is out to prove that in spades… <g> Check out his two new papers: “XML Support in Visual Basic 9” (with Brian Beckman) and “Confessions of a Used Programming Language Salesman.”