Re: VB
Submitted by richard dale on Tue, 09/23/2008 – 20:15.

I’ve no idea if it has any merit. The Gambas IDE seems to be popular, and so there must still be people who want to program in Basic. I read this tutorial while I was hunting around for details about the syntax of VB. The tone is very different to something targeted at C# programmers. For instance, it has a section entitled ‘what is a variable’. I think it is very difficult for us (experienced programmers) to remember what it is like to be starting from scratch, and so until we get beginner programmers trying to learn Qt or KDE programming and giving us feedback we won’t really know.

Visual Basic looks pretty ugly and hostile to me personally. But then I’ve not much background as a Basic programmer, apart from 6 weeks in 1996 programming VB 3.0 which I hated after having been using the NeXT programming environment for a long time. Maybe it used to be perceived as friendly because it always had an interactive command line, and hence my comment at the end of my blog about VB needing something like the new interactive C# feature.

I think that is a very reasonable response to the comment you quoted in your article.

It seems to me that Richard Dale is trying to make it possible for beginners to contribute to KDE, and I think that is a very worthy goal. Yet here you are attacking him and his efforts.

Some nice and understanding guy you are.