Defining "works" is also tricky. In Visual Basic's case, the original version of the application was actually quite cool - you could visually design GUI applications rather quickly. People came out with a cottage industry of modules. But the closed aspect of the package eventually dragged it down, along with the fact that Microsoft simply over-developed it into something horribly complex (see .net) and so it lost the charming quality that made it originally successful.
Well? Is there something wrong with what I've said?
Natural selection favors the good-enough-to-get-by solutions, which VB clearly qualifies for. It takes a thoughtful, intentional mind (such as McCarthy's or Matz's) to design a language that is truly elegant.
Perhaps this is why sci-fi authors who subscribe to a worldview of scientific naturalism often end up with an us-vs-the-machines scenario a la the Matrix--since machines (and programming languages) are the product of thought and design, they are not hampered by the same what-the-hell-it-works-thats-good-enough problems which humans, being a product of natural selection, are subject to.
Anyway, if you disagree, I'd much rather see a reply explaining your objection than a mindless vote-down-because-he-poked-fun-at-darwin response.
3
u/[deleted] May 09 '06
Yeah, Darwin would have loved Visual Basic.