Computers

Visual Basic for Linux

By Male Muse ⋅ April 29, 2008 ⋅  Email This Post ⋅  Print This Post ⋅ Post a comment

In the olden days Microsoft was a company that made these really cool programming languages. Microsoft had good motivation to make cool tools because it brought programmers into the Windows fold and by default made them Windows evangelists.

Although my first programming experiences were on a unpopular platform called MSX, which was a Microsoft initiative somewhat popular in Europe at the time. I really got into Visual Basic after a tip by a programmer friend. Visual Basic was cool, you could draw a button and then add events to it. It just seemed to make sense how it worked and the principles behind it. I can still recall the pleasure that I enjoyed making my first programs in that early version of visual basic.

Over the years Microsoft advanced Visual Basic actively for a while. Then it stalled while they seemed to focus on the C language. I believe this around the time of Windows NT 3.0 to 4.0. My early experiences with Visual Studio were not as enjoyable as those with early Visual Basic.

Time went on and my duties changed so I didn’t work as often with the Visual Studio system. Soon I fell behind by a revision and I was not able to get my head around the newer user interface. What happened to the fun? How did this happen?

In the early days it seemed that Microsoft spend a lot of thought and time creating their programming systems. Although operating systems were cool and Windows 3.0, 3.1 and 3.11 were seriously awesome, it seemed like they were simply platforms to host these cool programming tools for the purpose of allowing people to make whatever programs they wanted or needed.

Today it feels that the roles have somehow reversed. Now it seem that the programming suites and languages are a byproduct of new operating systems simply so Microsoft can say yeah we have tools for programming this. Microsoft’s attention and focus has gone from creating really great programming tools to making business tools. Now Microsoft is too worried about changing the look and feel of their own applications than making good tools for other programmers to make their applications. Seriously, how many new features does Word or Excel really need? Do you use any more features that you can count on one hand, maybe two if you are a power user? Give me a break. And now with Office 2007 all your employees need training, or at the very least you get a drop in productivity until they figure out for themselves where everything is and how to do tasks they could already do on the previous version? You could give your whole company masturbation breaks twice a day and get better productivity form your people.

So what does this have to do with Visual Basic on Linux? Easy. Microsoft is losing market to Linux. In fact my opinion is Linux will prevail over anything Microsoft can make from now on in the operating system space. Windows is going to be a period of history in a time line on Wikipedia whether anyone likes it or not.
Steve Ballmer has no capacity to lead the company in new directions simply because he is not technical. Bill Gates was technical and in those olden days he knew what products to make and where to apply focus, and most of all why.

At this point Microsoft would do well to start now by building or porting some of their programming tools to Linux. I personally believe that Visual Basic would be a great place to start.

Microsoft, make a Visual Basic for Linux. How much could that hurt anyway?

Tags: Computers, Linux, Software Developement