PowerBuilder Is Dead @ POWERBUILDER DEVELOPER'S JOURNAL: "What all of these self-proclaimed PowerBuilder 'replacements' have forgotten is that productivity is king. They and, to a large degree, the developer community have become more enamored with elegance and design than function and delivery. Businesses chose PowerBuilder to get stuff done and make their businesses more successful. That was the only metric that mattered then and that is the only metric that matters now. That's the metric by which any competing tool must be judged and, unfortunately for most available technologies today, that is where they fail."
The annual PB is dead article (funny there haven't been any other PB articles at SYS-Conman for a long time). The author misses the part where the rapidly developed PB applications scramble the database in ways that are not discovered for years. Missing and misplaced data, and point-and-click programmers who don't have the experience or inclination to find it. PowerBuilder absolves the programmer of the need to know what they are doing. Like so many tools of this kind you can slap together an interface that looks fairly good in short order, and blame all the odd things that happen afterward on "some weird computer glitch" AKA those underlying SQL statements that you never quite figured out.
Elegance and design have their place, fortunately, with applications that do important things.
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ReplyDeleteThe annual PB is dead article (funny there haven't been any other PB articles at SYS-Conman for a long time).
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Annual? No PB artcle on sys-con? Well, obviously do not read articles on PBDJ regularly - pbdj.sys-con.com - look for archives.
That and you have definitely never worked with PowerBuilder. You are are junior programmer who has not been long in industry to understand there are good and bad programmers in every area of IT.
I did visit the site. By accident, while googling for articles on a totally unrelated subject. Thats why I was surprised to see most of the "Hotest News" dated January 2004! The one article I found that was both (a) about PowerBuilder (as opposed to about Sybase or .NET) and (b) written during 2005 was the one I referenced. Of course it is rather hard to navigate the syscon website when every time you click on anything it restarts the unedited video story about AJAX. Here is a cut-and-paste from the pbdj main page... it speaks for itself:
ReplyDeleteHOT POWERBUILDER STORIES
Mike Masons New Book Pragmatic
January 26, 2005 Reads: 2,953
Is the New Year Really Going to Be New
January 9, 2004 Reads: 485
Enterprise Development
January 9, 2004 Reads: 784
PowerBuilder at a Dead End? Hardly
January 9, 2004 Reads: 1,945 Replies: 4
Pocket PowerBuilder v1.5 - Boldly
January 9, 2004 Reads: 1,037
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I have programmed in just about every major computer language since 1970 or so. I only programmed with Powerbuilder for a short time and thought it was junk. I stay in touch with PB programmers who continue to work with it because the alternative is to be out of work. They spend a lot of time debugging and looking for their data.
I stopped reading syscon after the Ogara fiasco. Their web site is a disaster.