We interrupt our normal friendly .Net/tech blogging… (from: Jay Kimble)
http://codebetter.com/blogs/jay.kimble/archive/2005/03/15/59848.aspx | Comments
For a Rant!
I felt that Geoff’s Rant (the last of which is here) answered this subject well… I told myself (stay out of it)… you don’t want to be a part of the lunacy… you were a part of it once before, and now you should just stay out of it…
Until, I saw Joel’s Spolsky’s post here and then Scoble highlighting it again. I think Joel is doing people a disservice as do I think the petition does. I’m not talking about companies here; companies will always make strange decisions to support the unsupportable because they think they can save money… I think there are people out there like I was…
<introduce cheezy back in time effect />
[Sorry, for stealing Geoff, it was a cool device that I’m borrowing]
Let’s flash back to about Summer of 2001… this was when I first heard about Bill Vaughn referring to VB.Net as “Visual Fred” (It’s not VB) and MVP Karl Peterson’s VB.Not list. When I read Karl’s list I was so pissed you can’t believe… I was a VB god… I was the king and all others bowed before my VB greatness! I was better at it than 99% of the people I met (I believed that then..)
Even then I decided that I would need to move forward to something… I had tried Java and the tools at the time absolutely sucked! glorified notepad… who needs it… So I decided to jump on the C# bandwagon… It was a new language so I could trick myself into learning something new, and not have to make comparisons… The reason I told myself was that VB.Net is NOT VB… I wanted nothign to do with it…
<introduce cheezy time travel effect />
Fast forward about 1 year where I’m now working for a <nameless company that I still work for>, and I’m starting to help put together a .Net strategy for my project… unfortunately we have standardized on VB.Net, so I have to leave C# (which I haven’t really gained much knowledge of.. in fact I discovered early on that I hate case sensitivity in a language… Needless to say I was forced to do VB.Net
<introduce cheezy time travel effect again />
Fast forward a few months and I have discovered under the right tutelage that my name 1 year ago was really Mort… I was totally clueless… I have begun to embrace OOP which was something I knew about but never saw any true use for… I’m learning and growing again, and I thought I had arrived… silly white man…
<introduce cheezy time travel effect again />
Back to today… I can’t stand opening up the VB6 editor (and I avoid it at all costs… it’s painful… The VB6 syntax that I so desperately wanted to hang onto is still there for the most part, but it has been placed in my mind with some other languages I was once really proficient at like FoxPro (for Windows) 2.6… it’s over… I refuse to go back… I even edit ASP pages in the Visual Studio editor…
Now, getting back to my rant… by doing things like the petition or telling people that they shouldn’t have to move forward like Mr. Spolsky did, you are really encouraging people to stay behind… On top of that I say you are keeping companies behind the times which means you are ultimately hurting the industry… How are you hurting industry? Simple, people ultimately make the decisions to move forward… most of our superiors aren’t as technical as we are and they rely on us for recommendations… we don’t make the decisions but we are heavy influencers on them. If we say we’d rather do something a different way, most of my bosses have considered (and usually followed) my suggestion… anyway, companies are still in a belt tightening mode, and they think that they can continue to not spend much money on IT… I’m not saying that they should be spending huge amounts of money… but new projects should be a part of their business strategy…
Ok, my rant is dwindling down… We have got to quit encouraging people to stay behind… VB.Net is a paradigm shift, but it is an upgrade from classic VB (and there are a number of strategies that Geoff lists a number of them)… you can dwell on the VB.Not list or you can move forward and see that life is actually better on the .Net side of the fence…
<let the flaming begin />