� Ed Brown at Vision Circle | Main | Olivier's Hamlet: Take One �
August 11, 2004
VB, VBA, VBS, VB.Net
I thought that I would be able to get away with buying just one O'Reilly book on VB. It turns out that there are even more flavors of this stuff than I thought. Fortunately, the kind I needed was more of the same: VBA.
I shouldn't complain that at this late stage in my career that I am automating spreadsheets. After all, the pay is very good at the moment and it does keep me on my toes. But in the course of doing so I have discovered VBS, which looks to be something I actually didn't expect to find - a fairly capable scripting language for Wintel. I don't know snap about VBS except that it looks like it instantiates methods out of the big class of VB objects. That's a fairly fabulous capability to have driven from the command line. That is, if it all works.
set shell = wscript.createobject("wscript.shell")
set fs = createobject("scripting.filesystemobject")
Since my new business model is taking me on a tour of the Second World, which on days like yesterday appears more and more fascinating, I expect to be seeing a lot more of this kind of code. But it only makes me wonder even more about the 'alternatives' of Perl and PHP. How is it that small companies have overlooked the simplicity of these free alternatives to Microsoft VB? Is real programming talent that scarce? Scary.
Posted by mbowen at August 11, 2004 03:53 PM
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Comments
It's the Borg known as MicroSoft.
Fire up Visual Studio and it becomes obvious right away why the freebies lag.
Posted by: DarkStar at August 11, 2004 05:18 PM
VBS does let you work with just about the whole VB library, COM, all manner of nasty mess. Never liked the language, though.
I'm working PHP for the first time and it's like every other weakly-typed language to me: I can't learn anything about it until I apply it to something practical.
That's all my personal flaws, though.
Small companies are now seriously picking up on LAMP software. They didn't before because they didn't exist on systems they had access too. I got a choice between a $2000 development system including software and tools, or a $5-10K Sun system, between a company that sells to me and one that sells to corporations to whom price = security, I got little difficulty choosing. Especially when there's one whole hell of a lot more potential clients.
Posted by: P6 at August 11, 2004 07:01 PM
Fire up Visual Studio? It's more like prepare the countdown for a rocket launch. That thing dims all the lights in my neighborhood, takes over half of the extensions I've already assigned and eats up all the disk I've got. Can't live with it, can't shoot it.
Posted by: Cobb at August 11, 2004 11:07 PM
Just the opposite, I started in VBA -- but I never mastered it and never really went beyond weak-typed scripting languages. These daze I'm trying to get Perl through my soft noggin.
For my modest uses, it might be the last lang I ever need learn. It's truly the Borg of languages. Even plays nice with Excel .
It may not be the worlds-destroying equal of VB Studio, but Activestate has a number of highly touted IDEs for freebie coding. Worth a look.
Posted by: memer at August 12, 2004 11:46 PM