I think it’s just coding snobery! Everyone likes to have something to look down upon eg Halfords bikes.

I’ve never really understood what people mean by that.

It means that when writing code you don’t know what’s what. This is sodding confusing. Less structure, more free-for-all write however you feel.

It’s meant to be easy. Takes away all that pesky type safety stuff… 😯

It means that when writing code you don’t know what’s what. This is sodding confusing. Less structure, more free-for-all write however you feel.

You can be very sloppy in VBA, although Option Explicit tightens that up to some extent. I can see why they did it as it makes the language very accessible.

Accessible? You can’t just cover up important details in the hope it’ll make life easier. Cos it makes life much much harder in the long run. Object types are something you just have to know if you are going to do OO programming.

I think it’s just coding snobery! Everyone likes to have something to look down upon eg Halfords bikes.

no – try writing large, complicated, systems – then you will appreciate things like type safety and the power of interfaces – something that you can now do in VB but it is still not a natural VB style. You couldn’t even multi-thread in VB until .NET I think (without hacking).

Coding in terms in interfaces is a very powerful technique as it hides implementation and allow implementation substitution, but it also allows/enables many of the recent modern programming paradigms like test-driven development/mocking, etc, and dependency injection which is very relevant with languages like C# and Java, allowing much better control over object lifetimes, etc.

Accessible?

why should it be accessible – it is a programming language and programmers like to think of themselves as ‘engineers’, so they should have some degree of competence.

This accessibility causes all sorts of problems, managers think that because they can slap together something that appears to work in a few days, that programmers should then be able to develop robust applications suitable for company-wide/global deployment in similarly short timescales.

Object types are something you just have to know if you are going to do OO programming.

I don’t disagree, but 99% of VBA code are just small programs automating Excel functionality, in which case it doesn’t really matter….

There’s nothing inherent in VB/VBA which prevents you writing decent code, just that you can choose not to…..

There’s nothing inherent in VB/VBA which prevents you writing decent code

only if you want to write mickey mouse code, at least for VBA. If you want to do anything ambitious then it is a brickwall that you have to hack around.

Another of MS’s triumphs, Excel and the spreadsheet environment could have been such a good and powerful application environment, but they had to screw it up with their typical incompetence.

OK, does anyone have any experience using Windows 8 with a windowsphone 8 handset?

I have a Lumia 820 and it’s a bit of a pain synching the phone with the W7 laptop so i’m debating an upgrade to W8.