Linus on Visual Basic, Norvig on Javascript, Heinemeier Hansson on taste

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Courtesy of John Lam - some of the greater fish in the sea of programming answered some questions on Sztywny Blog:

Sometimes you don't know whether a compliment is a compliment. Linus Torvalds says Visual Basic did more for programming than object orientation.

For example, I personally believe that "Visual Basic" did more for programming than "Object-Oriented Languages" did. Yet people laugh at VB and say it’s a bad language, and they’ve been talking about OO languages for decades.

And no, Visual Basic wasn’t a great language, but I think the easy DB interfaces in VB were fundmantally more important than object orientation is, for example.

Peter Norvig, yes that Peter Norvig at Google thinks he needs to keep improving his Javascript. It always annoys me when people think they know javascript - not that it's unknowable, but knowing how to do alerts and toggle DIV visibility is for kids.

David Heinemeier Hansson gives the answers I would expect from him, especially espousing "values" as standing between good and mediocre programmers. For a long time I've been wanting to blog about his talk at Carson Workshops concerning "beautiful code."

The whole round table interview is interesting.

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