Torvalds on VB

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?"

Linus Torvalds:

I 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”.

I'm floored. Really. I don't know what to say.

IsDate() silliness

https://connect.microsoft.com/VisualStudio/feedback/ViewFeedback.aspx?FeedbackID=219046

For the life of me, I cannot understand why Microsoft would change the behavior of a function that has been in place for X years.

Does allowing date values with a decimal separator make any sense to anyone out there?

I only stumbled on this because a corporate expeditor was searching for a voucher whose value was $819.03. If the value had been, let's say, $1600.46, it wouldn't have been an issue.