Re: Open source C++ Bot

[MyndFyre]

Aren't OCX files pretty much Code reuse in VB6?

Yes, but OCX isn't the advent of Visual Basic - it's an ActiveX component library, which is tied to COM.

[brew]

Why not just walk? It's harder, so it must be better.

exercise is good for the mind&soul

In the corporate world, we actually sit down and talk about crazy things like code reuse, effective object modeling, software design, and cost effectiveness - you know, those things that you say make people poor programmers.

I would rather make that sweet generic .NET-looking gui with that time.
Code reuse, that's crazy! Like Win32 APIs. *me wonders what they're there for*

Then again, there mere fact you suggest VB6 as a language shows that you not only don't know what you're talking about here. You have no idea what you're doing in the programming world.

Time is money, ne? I can't think of a better way to make a program fast and neat-looking then with VB6.

It isn't just about the learning curve though, it's about moving past the unnecessary cruft from the past few years. Computers have evolved, programming has evolved, and therefore languages must evolve as well.

We, people, have evolved, does that mean we stop using C? I'm pretty sure part of the reason why Japanese people have such high IQs (120 on average, i think) might be the fact that they have to read, write, interpret, and think in a language that's harder then BF. See: My response to "Why not just walk? It's harder, so it must be better".
Myndfyre: ok

[Warrior]

Why not just walk? It's harder, so it must be better.

exercise is good for the mind&soul

In the corporate world, we actually sit down and talk about crazy things like code reuse, effective object modeling, software design, and cost effectiveness - you know, those things that you say make people poor programmers.

I would rather make that sweet generic .NET-looking gui with that time.
Code reuse, that's crazy! Like Win32 APIs. *me wonders what they're there for*

Then again, there mere fact you suggest VB6 as a language shows that you not only don't know what you're talking about here. You have no idea what you're doing in the programming world.

Time is money, ne? I can't think of a better way to make a program fast and neat-looking then with VB6.

It isn't just about the learning curve though, it's about moving past the unnecessary cruft from the past few years. Computers have evolved, programming has evolved, and therefore languages must evolve as well.

We, people, have evolved, does that mean we stop using C? I'm pretty sure part of the reason why Japanese people have such high IQs (120 on average, i think) might be the fact that they have to read, write, interpret, and think in a language that's harder then BF. See: My response to "Why not just walk? It's harder, so it must be better".
Myndfyre: ok

I give up.

idiot.

[Barabajagal]

Aren't OCX files pretty much Code reuse in VB6?

Yes, but OCX isn't the advent of Visual Basic - it's an ActiveX component library, which is tied to COM.

Never claimed it was. It's just very useful for efficiency in VB, and easy because it's an object

[Win32]

No, quite frankly it's a revolution in programming.
It gives the power to the programmer to control aspects of his program in unprecedented ways (well except for Java but who cares about them) and gives you the flexibility to implement the same idea over various languages in the .NET Branch.

In other words, all .NET languages are immediately interoperable and understand each other at even the most intricate levels.

That, and the language itself contains various advancements over even C++ in terms of raw feautures. They make the life of the programmer easier, ease of use means it takes you less time to write functional code. Time is money.

It's ridiculously easy to write a tool chain in .NET for any sort of project, it offers a rich UI experience coupled with the already ease of use of the .NET Framework.

The beauty of .NET is, if you don't like C#..use VB .NET, or C++/CLI, or IronPython/PHP/Ruby, or Boo, whatever. Hell, write your own .NET language.

Like Banana said, it offers the advantage of not having to worry about tracking memory or memory corruption.

This has plenty of advantages, first your programs are guaranteed a certain degree of performance since the Garbage Collector handles all of the loose ends of allocated memory. Secondly, for example in a Game programming environment where your code can  quickly become intertwined with various classes, it's a big advantage to have a Garbage Collected language cleaning up your messes of objects in hierarchal graphs.

Additionally, when you use a .NET Language you get the entire set of class libraries which ship with the runtime. You get access to classes to deal with almost everything. Want to access the registry? There's a class for that. Want to use a List of items? Class for that. Use a hash table? Class for that. Windowing? 2D Drawing? Cryptology? Classes for all of that. Just have a look around it one day, you'll be very pleased.

Bottom line is: .NET makes the programmer's life easier, easier equals less time spent, time equals money. .NET saves you money.

Broken down to: Programmer's are lazy and no longer skilled enough to deal with concepts beyond pretty pictures.

Honestly, if you need the language/framework to protect you from memory corruption and memory managment altogether, you shouldn't be a programmer at all.

No, it's because C is genuinely harder to use. Something harder to use, takes more caution, takes more planning, takes reevaluating, takes patching on a more frequent level than managed or even C++ applications.

This adds up and you find yourself wasting time better spent writing code in other parts of the project. Time is money. You're losing money.

It isn't just about the learning curve though, it's about moving past the unnecessary cruft from the past few years. Computers have evolved, programming has evolved, and therefore languages must evolve as well.

Take a look at C# without the .NET Framework, there's no doubting that when the ignorance about the Framework is eliminated from the picture that it's an incredible language. It's everything C++ should of been, and the only thing even worth touching (in the Cish world) is D at the moment.

I'll go back to my car analogy, why don't you drive a 70's rust bucket for the sake of it being harder? Hell, lose the power steering, seats, and wheels.
Why not just walk? It's harder, so it must be better.

Programming Languages are the same way, and I'd certainly take a sports car (C#) over walking on foot (C) any day.

Exactly, it's harder for you to use: You are one of those people.

You'd only be wasting time if you did not know what you were doing, which would imply the design phase has failed, nothing to do with the language.

Why would languages need to evolve? The .NET framework is hardly a language either, it's no different from any other library, like MFC. That said, all of your arguments fail if one was to simply write his/her own library, which many people do in the first place.

Your analogy makes you sound alot more like a user, rather than a programmer.

Aren't OCX files pretty much Code reuse in VB6? As for older cars, my dad drives a 1947 Chevy Pickup  The car analogy is not a good one, because really old cars are really cool, whereas I wouldn't ever want to use older languages like APL or FORTRAN nowadays.

OCX, COM, DLL, EXE, they're all the same, PE format. Just depends on the interpretation.

Why would it? From what RealityRipple has shown me, his PowerBASIC is nearly the same thing as C with BASIC syntax. It could be quite low level if one wanted to. A language is a method of transmitting ideas, so really, all languages are the same except for the built-in limitations imposed by the compiler itself. Note: A language with BASIC syntax and a language like Visual Basic 6 are entirely different things, you don't get cute boilerplate window code in PowerBASIC

Care to put that to the test?

[brew]

Why would it? From what RealityRipple has shown me, his PowerBASIC is nearly the same thing as C with BASIC syntax. It could be quite low level if one wanted to. A language is a method of transmitting ideas, so really, all languages are the same except for the built-in limitations imposed by the compiler itself. Note: A language with BASIC syntax and a language like Visual Basic 6 are entirely different things, you don't get cute boilerplate window code in PowerBASIC

Care to put that to the test?

No. But I'm sure RealityRipple would. . .

[Warrior]

Broken down to: Programmer's are lazy and no longer skilled enough to deal with concepts beyond pretty pictures.

Honestly, if you need the language/framework to protect you from memory corruption and memory managment altogether, you shouldn't be a programmer at all.

Why implement the useless boilerplate code all together? Using .NET and other type safe languages you can make assumptions about the state of your program at all times. It's an advantage which can save you time when writing an extensive project.

What part of this are you not understanding? Are you so insecure about your programming skills that you'd take the hardheaded pseudo macho approach to programming as opposed to an elegant solution? You're over complicating things without a justified reason.

You'd only be wasting time if you did not know what you were doing, which would imply the design phase has failed, nothing to do with the language.

Why would languages need to evolve? The .NET framework is hardly a language either, it's no different from any other library, like MFC. That said, all of your arguments fail if one was to simply write his/her own library, which many people do in the first place.

Your analogy makes you sound alot more like a user, rather than a programmer.

No, you waste time nontheless. Everytime you need to sit down and accommodate bad language design, you're wasting time. Every time you have to collect memory you're wasting time. Every memory leak is wasted time, every buffer overflow is wasted time. Things like this add up.

You simply don't have to simplicity and the power that the .NET Framework gives you. Interop against a family of languages is valuable as some of the languages could be put to use as scripting languages, since you can invoke the CLR into any running .NET program.

Why do languages need to evolve? Because the programmer evolves. I guarantee that the needs of programmers back when C was designed are radically different then the needs of the programmers now. It shouldn't even be a question that they need to evolve. Like Operating Systems, and even entire architectures revisions and improvements are made.

If you think C is a perfect language, and all the wisdom gained throughout the years are worthless then you're delusional. The answer is of course languages must evolve.

The .NET Framework is exactly this, language evolution.

Additionally, it's more than a set of libraries. It's an entire run time. From start to the end of execution the CLR is in complete control of every aspect of the program.

Memory is safe, members are known to every assembly communicating with each other. Best of all, it interops with unmanaged code rather easily.

You have the best of both worlds, you have the simplicity that C# (and other .NET languages) provide, you have security.

The fact is, the .NET Framework is the future of programming on the Windows platform. In the coming years we're going to see it being pushed more for the wonderful technology it is and integrated more tightly with Windows. This is already evident from the fact that it's actually bundled with Windows Vista.

If you're claiming that things like LINQ, WPF, and others don't make the programming experience better then I suggest you sit down and play a bit with the technologies.

It's easy to criticize something that you view from a distance. The saying goes "Once you used managed code, unmanaged code just doesn't cut it" (Ok so I made that up).

[Dale]

Why not just walk? It's harder, so it must be better.

exercise is good for the mind&soul

In the corporate world, we actually sit down and talk about crazy things like code reuse, effective object modeling, software design, and cost effectiveness - you know, those things that you say make people poor programmers.

I would rather make that sweet generic .NET-looking gui with that time.
Code reuse, that's crazy! Like Win32 APIs. *me wonders what they're there for*

Then again, there mere fact you suggest VB6 as a language shows that you not only don't know what you're talking about here. You have no idea what you're doing in the programming world.

Time is money, ne? I can't think of a better way to make a program fast and neat-looking then with VB6.[/u]

It isn't just about the learning curve though, it's about moving past the unnecessary cruft from the past few years. Computers have evolved, programming has evolved, and therefore languages must evolve as well.

We, people, have evolved, does that mean we stop using C? I'm pretty sure part of the reason why Japanese people have such high IQs (120 on average, i think) might be the fact that they have to read, write, interpret, and think in a language that's harder then BF. See: My response to "Why not just walk? It's harder, so it must be better".
Myndfyre: ok

Oh..god.. Are you kidding me? Visual basic is so fucking sloppy. It's almost better programming in LOLCode (seriously).

[Barabajagal]

Uggg... if I must.

PowerBasic's compiler includes inline assembly, excellent variable types (BYTE, WORD, DWROD, QWORD, INTEGER, LONG, QUAD, etc...), multiple types of strings (STRING and ASCIIZ), Pre-declared APIs (you don't type in any of the delcares like you would in VB, they're all already declared and only the ones required are added into the program... it's pretty nifty), no runtime files except for any declares you make yourself, raw windows event messages control and handle all events, 64 bit native support, a DOS compiler, an attempt at a RAD system for GUIs (personally, I can't stand any of the IDEs in PowerBasic, but I'll get used to them eventually), Peek and Poke (memory reading/writing), EXE or DLL compilation, standard windows Resource files for all resources and version info, an excellent amount of constants (with a nice % prefix for all of them), requirement to convert variable types (not like VB's stupid long can equal string crap, you gotta manually convert using Str$ or Val), built in TCP/UDP commands... even a #BLOAT compiler message to create larger executables [basically poking fun at bloatware].

Give me something to make in pb (simple, please, I'm still learning the language ) and I'll give you the code and the compiled program to compare against somethin in C. And as of yet, PB only works for windows, but they're apparently working on multi-platform stuff.

[brew]

Uggg... if I must.

PowerBasic's compiler includes inline assembly, excellent variable types (BYTE, WORD, DWROD, QWORD, INTEGER, LONG, QUAD, etc...), multiple types of strings (STRING and ASCIIZ), Pre-declared APIs (you don't type in any of the delcares like you would in VB, they're all already declared and only the ones required are added into the program... it's pretty nifty), no runtime files except for any declares you make yourself, raw windows event messages control and handle all events, 64 bit native support, a DOS compiler, an attempt at a RAD system for GUIs (personally, I can't stand any of the IDEs in PowerBasic, but I'll get used to them eventually), Peek and Poke (memory reading/writing), EXE or DLL compilation, standard windows Resource files for all resources and version info, an excellent amount of constants (with a nice % prefix for all of them), requirement to convert variable types (not like VB's stupid long can equal string crap, you gotta manually convert using Str$ or Val), built in TCP/UDP commands... even a #BLOAT compiler message to create larger executables [basically poking fun at bloatware].

Give me something to make in pb (simple, please, I'm still learning the language ) and I'll give you the code and the compiled program to compare against somethin in C. And as of yet, PB only works for windows, but they're apparently working on multi-platform stuff.

Just curious, does PowerBASIC support function pointers? And how about exporting functions?

[Dale]

Yes.

[MyndFyre]

I would rather make that sweet generic .NET-looking gui with that time.
Code reuse, that's crazy! Like Win32 APIs. *me wonders what they're there for*

Honestly, if you need the language/framework to protect you from memory corruption and memory managment altogether, you shouldn't be a programmer at all.
Why would languages need to evolve? The .NET framework is hardly a language either, it's no different from any other library, like MFC. That said, all of your arguments fail if one was to simply write his/her own library, which many people do in the first place.

Let's say you need to parse XML.  Are you going to write an XML parsing engine each time you need to do so?  It's a fairly common need, since XML is (*gasp*) interoperable among disparate systems.  Of course you're not; you'll use a library.  Are you going to roll it just once?

You'll roll it according to the needs of your project.  But what happens when your needs change and grow, or what happens when you get another project?

You either have to adapt your XML parsing engine or rewrite it from scratch.  Both take time.

An object-oriented approach allows you to build a flexible engine.  Java and .NET both provide forward-only (XmlReader in .NET) and random-access (XmlDocument in .NET) XML reading implementations in their base class libraries.  Why should my company ever have had to waste the time in the first place to re-roll a library?  To demonstrate that I know what I'm doing?  Fuck, why don't I just write a compiler from scratch, rewrite the entire Windows API in assembly/C?  Wait, why stop there - why not rewrite the entire C library?  To hell with strcmp - I'm making myndfyre_strcmp()!

My company bills $125/hr to our clients for my time.  How can they justify the expense to our customers, who want to spend as little money as possible for as much functionality as possible?  "We want to make sure you're getting a good programmer."  Yeah, and then the client leaves.

At work I'm rated on the following: 1.) ability to make deadlines, 2.) effective estimation, 3.) ability to forward-think and plan for future changes, and 4.) producing a minimal number of defects.  That's what the client is paying for.  Apparently, my company doesn't care whether I can reimplement the Windows object manager.

brew, specifically: Where does the "competency" train end with you?  Why is the Win32 API the stopping point?  Why don't we make the "unit of code reuse" the C library?  Assembler?  Hell, why not machine code?  Assembler is just a mneumonic device.  

brew and Win32: On that note, since assembler is just a mneumonic device, why don't we just drop it entirely?  Program directly in machine code?

Seriously, nobody has answered my question: why should programming be difficult?

[Dale]

I would rather make that sweet generic .NET-looking gui with that time.
Code reuse, that's crazy! Like Win32 APIs. *me wonders what they're there for*

Honestly, if you need the language/framework to protect you from memory corruption and memory managment altogether, you shouldn't be a programmer at all.
Why would languages need to evolve? The .NET framework is hardly a language either, it's no different from any other library, like MFC. That said, all of your arguments fail if one was to simply write his/her own library, which many people do in the first place.

Let's say you need to parse XML.  Are you going to write an XML parsing engine each time you need to do so?  It's a fairly common need, since XML is (*gasp*) interoperable among disparate systems.  Of course you're not; you'll use a library.  Are you going to roll it just once?

You'll roll it according to the needs of your project.  But what happens when your needs change and grow, or what happens when you get another project?

You either have to adapt your XML parsing engine or rewrite it from scratch.  Both take time.

An object-oriented approach allows you to build a flexible engine.  Java and .NET both provide forward-only (XmlReader in .NET) and random-access (XmlDocument in .NET) XML reading implementations in their base class libraries.  Why should my company ever have had to waste the time in the first place to re-roll a library?  To demonstrate that I know what I'm doing?  Fuck, why don't I just write a compiler from scratch, rewrite the entire Windows API in assembly/C?  Wait, why stop there - why not rewrite the entire C library?  To hell with strcmp - I'm making myndfyre_strcmp()!

My company bills $125/hr to our clients for my time.  How can they justify the expense to our customers, who want to spend as little money as possible for as much functionality as possible?  "We want to make sure you're getting a good programmer."  Yeah, and then the client leaves.

At work I'm rated on the following: 1.) ability to make deadlines, 2.) effective estimation, 3.) ability to forward-think and plan for future changes, and 4.) producing a minimal number of defects.  That's what the client is paying for.  Apparently, my company doesn't care whether I can reimplement the Windows object manager.

brew, specifically: Where does the "competency" train end with you?  Why is the Win32 API the stopping point?  Why don't we make the "unit of code reuse" the C library?  Assembler?  Hell, why not machine code?  Assembler is just a mneumonic device. 

brew and Win32: On that note, since assembler is just a mneumonic device, why don't we just drop it entirely?  Program directly in machine code?

Seriously, nobody has answered my question: why should programming be difficult?

Programming isn't, It's how you plan your code, and how you restrain yourself; Coding isn't hard, It just takes practice and patients.

[MyndFyre]

Programming isn't, It's how you plan your code, and how you restrain yourself; Coding isn't hard, It just takes practice and patients.

I don't disagree.  They seem to, though.

[Dale]

Some of you may laugh, but I've been taking a course for C++, and personally I've benefited, not because I learned the syntax better in a classroom environment; but because the books and the my professor gave me more knowledge on how to plan your code out and understand the inners of it. It's really a good experience.