On Wed, Jul 25, 2001 at 12:42:27PM -0400, Derek Glidden wrote:
<snip>
> (And P.S. Delphi is essentially Turbo Pascal, which, despite arguments
> to the contrary that Pascal is only good as a teaching language, is a
> really cool language to work in. Turbo Pascal bears as much relation to
> the "standard" Pascal language as Visual Basic does to BASIC, only in a
> good way, instead of in a scary way. :)
>
My second (third, if you count English ;-) language was Turbo Pascal. (I
sort of assumed it was straight Pascal, but with a fast compiler; it's
not?) While it's light years beyond BASIC, I still think it's best used
to teach structured programming. Once you learn C, then you've got a
real language at your disposal.
<snip>
> My biggest fear though, is that the availability of an easy, Free-to-Use
> tool like this will be akin to the availability of Visual Basic under
> Windows and result in thousands of half-witted "Drag-n-Drop Programmers"
> churning out thousands and thousands of extremely crappy programs that
> do effectively nothing. It's nice to have an environment that lets you
> quickly prototype and build applications, but the whole paradigm of the
> Visual Basic-eque "drag-n-drop to build the UI first, then write the
> code" is the worst thing that's ever happened to programming, AFAIC.
>
I agree, but you can absolutely count on truckloads of brain-dead luser
applications from this. If I were hiring programmers, I'd sit 'em down
in front of vi/jed/emacs and make them prove to me they could really
program, not drag/drop.
Paul
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