Dear axtens:
On Thursday, August 5, 2021 at 9:44:28 PM UTC-7, axtens wrote:
I'm the maintainer of the vbnet track at Exercism.io and
having had the experience of becoming that, inheriting
someone else's work, and getting almost there for the v3
release next month I've been wondering how I'd go
maintaining other languages.
It isn't the language so much, but the effort the previous programmer put into documentation, standards, naming conventions, and so on. Then add in that you are programming "against" / "within" a target OS. Windoze has been trying with each new
iteration to force all database applications onto one of their server platforms. So unless you are willing to be a complete maverick and alone, ride the horse in the direction it is going.
In the event that I created a learning track for xBase
languages, which dialect? Are...
- Harbour, ... alive, active development, but not much covered in this newsgroup
- xHarbour ... fairly stagnant. No wide characters. Been standing on the "nearly 100% backwards compatible with Clipper 5.3" for its whole life. Has a lot of good extensions (SQL and so on) in the commercial package.
- and XSharp ... this is the direction the horse is running in.
[are they] sufficiently similar that one can learn one
and migrate readily to either of the others?
Superficially Harbour and xHarbour read about the same. X# is not at all the same. X# will be an easier migration from C#, C++, and so on.
Getting a track going is half the problem. The other is
finding mentors and I haven't done any serious xBase
programming for years.
Yea, I'd recommend doing what your heart tells you to do. xBase is what Micro$haft has tried first to control (FauxPro) and then actively kill. They (M$) make peer-to-peer networks as hard as possible (but still possible), and xBase assumes a more
intimate access than occurs in real life.
I am not on or near any cutting edge, and I am still pissed that Computer Associates decided to C-ify the dBase language, functions instead of commands. So take what I say with a grain of salt. But frankly any effort you put into xBase, will make you
an "expert" = "ex" is a has-been, and a "spurt" is a drip under pressure. It will not increase your marketability. WHAT DO YOU WANT TO BE, when you've walked this road?
David A. Smith
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