The big programming debate rages on (if only in my mind). On the one hand you have the might of Microsoft, with it’s army of programmers and industry backing – but some would argue lack of practical day to day programming requirements. They are offering two contenders; Visual Basic and Vb.Net. The dot net stuff is interesting – but behind the scenes just money for programmers and Microsoft (again) re-inventing themselves. Still most people follow suit regardless … BTW if your migrating from VB to VB.NET you need the code advisor for vb6.0.
Then you have the lightweight BUT (some would argue, in the real world) much better products by the small boys. The main contender perhaps being Powerbasic. Grey Matter in the UK sell it for around £114 – it’s well worth the investment, even if it’s just to get a compiler that does not need a runtime environment! Powerbasic is interesting… It creates small, tight, fast code – BUT – it’s not Microsoft. There lies the problem. To back functionality Vs. name.
I’m on the fence with this one. I’ve tried VB for some time (years) and will now try Powerbasic to see how well it copes with day to day, real life programming/business issues. There’s plenty of libraries for Powerbasic ranging from graphics to SQL and database systems – all pretty cheap – but do the job.
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