Should I argue with him?

Should I argue with him?


  • Total voters
    16

Winni

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Yesterday another guy told me about the risk of using tools like B4X vs tools backed by giants like Google or Apple.

This is an industry-wide problem, and managers in general prefer products from "blue chip companies" like Microsoft or IBM over products from small players. There's a high probability that the big guys like Microsoft will still be around tomorrow, but there's no guarantee that the mom & pop garage shop will still be in business next week.

Also, it's easier to find other developers in the market that know how to work with the big company products, but with niche products, it always becomes difficult and thus by definition more expensive and riskier. Look at it from a managerial perspective, it's much smarter to develop Android products in Java or Kotlin, iOS products in Swift and Microsoft Windows products in C# -- these are the platform native tools and developers for these tools are a dime a dozen. When you plan a software product, you don't expect the original developers to still be there five or ten years from now - but you usually expect your product to still be there. Who's gonna maintain it then? The one guy who had the fancy idea of using a completely unknown tool and who probably will have moved on to the next completely unknown tool just because that's even fancier? Or will it be a bunch of young students who have already had their first contact with industry standard tools in school or college?

You mentioned that person is a retired COBOL programmer - I rest my case: These guys are very rare these days but still in high demand and very expensive. And they can still use tools that were designed 50 years ago, because COBOL was - and in mainframe environments still is - an industry standard. Yes, that's right, banks and insurance companies still write new COBOL code every day. Just because COBOL never made it to the PC doesn't mean it became irrelevant.

This is not a discussion you can successfully have with the guy or anybody else in his position. But it's a discussion that you will always be having with yourself when you entertain the idea of working --with-- or --for-- other people. You are using a niche tool, the others out there don't. So it will always be you who doesn't fit in. (Been there a million times myself, it never stopped to suck.)

The question you need to ask is whether you ever want to fit in and do what everybody else is doing. If that answer is yes, then dump B4X and pick up Kotlin and Swift for mobile development, improve your C++ for the desktop side of things and if it's the (web) server you're after, invest in Go and Python -- and avoid the legacy languages Java, Perl and PHP, unless you want to maintain horrible old code bases others have written twenty years ago. Legacy and corporate stuff isn't interesting, and you can rest assured that interesting new stuff (emphasis on interesting) isn't written in Java or PHP or Perl anymore, full stop.

If you want to stay independent and do your own thing, then stick with the tool that you know and like the best and don't ever think about going down the corporate road again - event though corporate positions come with safe salaries, they do not include any space for creativity and playing the corporate game will only kill your brain and make you unhappy.

I could now write a lot about why all system engineers and system administrators worth their money hate the Java platform with a passion, but I'll leave it. Let's just say that in reality, outside of all the marketing nonsense and a developer's wishful thinking, the Java platform is only multi-platform on paper and experience dictates to avoid everything that requires the resource hog and maintenance nightmare called Java Runtime Environment whenever possible. (Even more so now that admins either have to mass deploy an open source/third party JRE or pay license fees to Oracle for deploying the official JRE - this is a huge and costly problem for enterprise-size deployments. The JDK can still be rolled out as is, but that is not what you do on a typical company/enterprise desktop, and Oracle knows that...)
 

CHK

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The important thing about coding is not the programming language. As others already mentioned her, languages come and go. And if you know one, you kow them all. A big difference makes your programming style and the programming tools you are forced to use. Some tools are excellent, and some tools are even so bad, that they force a bad programming style on you. Of course, tools come and go as well. But why not use an excellent toolset like B4X as long as it is available? And switch to another toolset (+language) when time will come? What is the benefit of waisting the presence for a future nobody knows? Using a bad toolset for many years because you think it will stay longer than a good one?

With a decent programming style you (and your possible successor) will master any change. And B4X not only allows a decent style, but forces you to develop a good one.
 

emexes

Expert
Licensed User
And if you know one, you know them all.
except APL :oops:

1593437951991.png
 

StephenRM

Member
I am very new to this platform, just started on 11 Jun 2020. Being very eager to develop a simple program, I started with Kotlin last month i.e, May, considering it to be an adapted language over Java and language of First choice, but as my Laptop is old, the gradle build took a lot of time. I searched for an alternative and came across MIT App Inventor. Later accidentally learnt B4X, BASIC for Android??? was not sure that BASIC language can be still so powerful, efficient, elegant. I started liking B4A as its easy, RAD and has more libraries. Moreover, many experts here on the forum, share libraries, programs and snippets. And that, NASA too has its projects in B4X, nothing to doubt about this platform.

Further, I do learn that this product has come out of Israel, that itself is amazing. B4X facilitates cross platform approach.
 

emexes

Expert
Licensed User
What does the above code produce?
I don't know. I remember investigating APL back in the 1980's because you could apparently do a lot with a little, but... it was too complicated for me.

Ditto (Turbo) Prolog.

BASIC gets me where I need to go, but there are some nice regularities in C that I fell in love with too.
 

ShepSoft

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Prolog (1972, A.Colmerauer & R.Kowalski):
$ cat hello.pl
:- initialization(main).
main :- write('Hello World!'), nl, halt.
 

udg

Expert
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Longtime User
APL: are we sure that A doesn't stand for Absurd?
Or even Alien, according to post #26 above :)
 

saeed10051

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i have tried learning and developing apps using android studio and even recently tried flutter also but being with VB6 background i find it extremely easy to develop in B4A. It is my choice of platform for developing android apps, but i also sometime think that anywhere software is a one man show with a very small footprint as compared to the main players in the industry. This worries me
 

aeric

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Longtime User
i have tried learning and developing apps using android studio and even recently tried flutter also but being with VB6 background i find it extremely easy to develop in B4A. It is my choice of platform for developing android apps, but i also sometime think that anywhere software is a one man show with a very small footprint as compared to the main players in the industry. This worries me
If one day Erel will disclose some info about the identity of the investor or what is Anywhere Software direction in the coming future, then I think it will reduce our concern as the developers in this community.
 

emexes

Expert
Licensed User
Grab this keyboard if it is on sale.
I think we have different interpretations of "sale". GBP 120 = 631 MYR = more than I paid for my last laptop, brand new (admittedly pretty crappy, was just for watching tv).

Edit: I missed that you said if it is on sale. Still kinda funny though. 👍
 

aeric

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I think we have different interpretations of "sale". GBP 120 = 631 MYR = more than I paid for my last laptop, brand new (admittedly pretty crappy, was just for watching tv).

Edit: I missed that you said if it is on sale. Still kinda funny though. 👍
Why you buy a laptop for watching TV? Buy a TV instead. 😆
631 MYR can't even get a netbook. Maybe a cheap tablet.
 

emexes

Expert
Licensed User
Why you buy a laptop for watching TV?.
It was cheaper to buy the laptop than to buy a smarter tv. Tv still works great as a display. Plus the Windows + mouse + keyboard interface is heaps simpler than those media center remote controls.
 

aeric

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Longtime User
It was cheaper to buy the laptop than to buy a smarter tv. Tv still works great as a display. Plus the Windows + mouse + keyboard interface is heaps simpler than those media center remote controls.
I bought a cheap "not-smart" 4K UHD TV last year. It cost MYR 1095. May be you are right that it is simpler to use a 101-keys keyboard than a 20+ buttons remote controls. 😅
 
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