noah’s mark

I just saw the funniest thing.

I’m watching this talk, by Eric Meijer, about Visual Basic.  During the talk, he keeps bringing up examples of where languages “stole” features from VB.  The first (and marginally less funny), is when he basically states that modules (i.e. collections of functions) were invented by Visual Basic. That’s right.

The second and even funnier example is when he says something along the lines of:

“Languages like F# that have a REPL, they got that from VB!  It’s been in VB since the beginning!”

That’s right, ladies and gentlemen - the fact that ML/OCaml/F# (and various other languages) have a read-eval-print loop is because they stole it from VB.

Judging by the timeline, VB must also have invented time travel  in order to go back to 1957, insert ideas into McCarthy’s head, and create the functions read, eval, and print in the newfangled Lisp language.

If you are going to claim to have invented (or that some language originated) a feature, then make sure it isn’t a feature that is named after the functions in the language it was originally in.  That would be Lisp, ladies and gentlemen.

Note that this isn’t a criticism of languages having a REPL - I find it to be incredibly useful.  But please, for chrissakes, don’t ever claim that Visual Basic was the originator of anything.  You can claim that Dartmouth Basic (with a long bow to Sidney Marshal on that front) was the originator of a few things, and you can certainly claim that the early on languages (Lisp, Algol, Simula, Fortran, PL1, Ada, what have you) came up with some great ideas.  Chances are, however, that Visual Basic only invented applying the word “visual” to things that aren’t.

The whole talk pisses me off for so many reasons - he calls languages like  ruby, python, php (possibly apt), and MySQL (I didn’t know it was a language) “amateur languages”.  He basically says that Microsoft creates really great technologies that are just too smart and intelligent for normal people, and so normal people use these crappy wannabe languages that weren’t invented at Microsoft.  Big honking bullshit alarm.  Oh, also, the phrase, “Tools cannot hide complexity” I find to be more complete crap - of course tools can hide complexity.  Do you really understand how C++ compilation works, or does the C++ compiler handle that all pretty well for you?  Would you like to translate directly between C++ and machine code?  Think that would be the same level of complexity?

For me, VB is like the epitome of crap - a combination of being uglier than Pamela Anderson without makeup and being this assuming piece of egotistical shite (e.g. the patent on the “IsNot” operator).  I would be eternally grateful if VB just died one day, and everybody forgot that it existed.  We could all move on and program in languages that aren’t just sad recreations of better languages.

The irony of this whole thing is that Eric Meijer is really a smart guy - he is one of the people behind Haskell, which seems to counterbalance the obvious dumbity in this talk.  Ah well.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, November 27th, 2007 at 2:11 pm and is filed under languages, programming. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.