[brlug-general] OT: Torvalds on VB

[Dustin Puryear]

I tend to agree. As far as VB and its impact (good and bad), I think
it's really hard to understate it.

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Tuesday, October 10, 2006, 9:55:32 AM, you wrote:

> In the context of a Slashdot article dealing with a student asking questions
> of great programmers, the following question was asked of Linus Torvalds:

> http://sztywny.titaniumhosting.com/2006/07/23/stiff-asks-great-programmers-answers/

> *"- What do you think will be the next big thing in computer programming?
> X-oriented programming, y language, quantum computers, what?"


> His response was as follows:

> "* don't think we'll see a „big jump". We've seen a lot of tools to help
> make all the everyday drudgery easier - with high-level languages and
> perhaps the integration of simple databases into the language being the main
> ones. But most of the buzz-words have been of pretty limited use.

> For example, I personally believe that „Visual Basic" did more for
> programming than „Object-Oriented Languages" did. Yet people laugh at VB and
> say it's a bad language, and they've been talking about OO languages for
> decades.

> And no, Visual Basic wasn't a great language, but I think the easy DB
> interfaces in VB were fundmantally more important than object orientation
> is, for example.

> So I think there will be a lot of incremental improvements, and the hardware
> improvements will make programming easier, but I don't expect any _huge_
> productivity help or revolutions in how people do things.

> At least not until you start approaching real AI, and I don't think real AI
> is going to be anything you will ever „program"

> This response is unbelievably telling.  I'm floored.