Thomas and friends, Sorry to reopen what is probably a closed conversation, but I'm a developer as well, and I have something to say. Further, I have a similar background to Thomas in regard to programming, and I'm not nearly as polite and restrained as he is. So let me be blunt:
VB is a toy scripting language useful only for small projects and hobby work. Full stop. Do not pass go, do not collect two hundred dollars. If anyone chooses to take that as an insult for some reason, go right ahead. I have zero patience for thin-skinned people that take offense at anything they feel might slight them. I have worked too long in this industry to tolerate drama queens. If developers want to release a small project that isn't necessarily portable, doesn't care about memory requirements, doesn't care about processor requirements, and doesn't always work exactly right, that's their business. In fact, a lot of applications fall into this category, and I personally use perl, PHP, and bash for a bunch of them. But I'd never use those for any serious, long term project. The fact of the matter is that rapid prototyping languages and scripting languages are meant for just that: rapid prototyping and scripting. I would never consider writing something like Alter Aeon in VB. The server has well over a million allocated objects in flight on a slow day, and I'd be surprised if the VB allocator could even create that many objects without crashing, much less keep track of them all. Finally, development time is largely unrelated to the choice of programming language once a project reaches a certain size. Any large project will have a number of libraries created over the years to make things easier and simpler. Myself, I spend at most 20% of my time actually writing C++ code. The remaining 80% is spent coming up with a good design, testing it, and getting feedback from the users. Switching to a faster language would provide virtually no benefit when adding new features to the game. In fact, lack of design and testing is the most common problem I see in programs. Sure, it's only a thousand lines of code, and it only took three days to implement. But it also doesn't work quite right, and it isn't consistent, and things that should be there aren't while things that are there probably shouldn't be. The solution to this is to design more, and code less, regardless of the programming language. Dennis Towne --- Gamers mailing list __ [email protected] If you want to leave the list, send E-mail to [email protected]. You can make changes or update your subscription via the web, at http://audyssey.org/mailman/listinfo/gamers_audyssey.org. All messages are archived and can be searched and read at http://www.mail-archive.com/[email protected]. If you have any questions or concerns regarding the management of the list, please send E-mail to [email protected].
