[Off topic] What to do, what to do :)

Elements Oxygene
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Looking at the enthusiasm and love with which Oxygen is described on your website (sales and docs), I’ve really started to doubt whether I should start working with Oxygen instead of Mercury :wink:

Mercury was the motivation to buy Elements, but now there’s the doubt. Damn. :slight_smile:

I once programmed for a very short while with Turbo Pascal version 3, somewhere in the end 80’s, which was the fastest compiler at that time. But then somehow I went to Turbo Basic, Visual Basic, VB.NET and finally (ugh) C#.

Oxygen or Mercury … what to do, what to do :wink: …

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Hi Marc,

First - if you want we can discuss this in dutch using PM (as I see your name :slight_smile: )

Oxygene is a really good program language, I still work with it - next to my VB projects and the Mercury project. Oxygene is, and will remain, the flagship of the elements languages (and for a reason).
I also worked with Turbo Pascal, Delphi and Free Pascal in the past, but my main language (read: income) has always been Visual Basic.
And after 25 years of mainly Visual Basic, it has become a second nature to me. If I do things in VB, I do it at least twice as fast as I can do it with any other language. Just because I think VB. When working with other languages, I expect (wrongly) all VB specific things - like passing a property by reference.
As I see it, the world has 3 kind of programming languages; the impossible variants for masochists (C++), languages for real (ahem) programmers (like c#, oxygene, c, java, etc) and languages for lazy programmers (VB).

So, it’s all up to what kind of programmer you are and how much you are attached to VB.

I would say - try Oxygene and see how things go from there. For me, Oxygene is a good second choice next to VB / Mercury.

See also my story about the quest of how I came to RemObjects Oxygene (in dutch): https://builditsolutions.net/oxygene.aspx

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And another point: Why choose? You can mix Oxygene and Mercury in the same project :smile:

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Yes I know, but I’m not a fan of that. Trying to focus on one thing is hard enough … :wink:

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Nice article. Many parts of it could be written by me :). Ik ben Nederlander inderdaad. Stuur je zo een PM.

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Marc,

I’ll throw in my 2 cents worth. I started programming in Fortran IV in 1966. Then started using PL/I which I loved, but which was admittedly somewhat complex, but VERY powerful (I wrote a mainframe spreadsheet program that IBM sold). I dabbled in IBM assembler, Cobol, and some other languages on various platforms and devices when I needed to. Then I started using Turbo Pascal. Pascal and PL/I have some sort of common roots. So I was happy to be able to do procedural programming on the PC in a FAST compiler.

Although I did some work in Visual Basic for the PC, eventually I programmed in Delphi for a LONG time. Those were very productive years. And then I moved on to Oxygene and .Net.

Oxygene was the best. Combined with using Xaml and the MVVM pattern. I used it for a number of years. I was hesitant at first to move away from Delphi and Borland products. But the power of .Net combined with the features of Oxygene meant that I ended up with no regrets. And RemObjects really PUMPS OUT the new features and languages like no other. And are very quick to respond to bugs.

I like Pascal variants better than the other languages. As Theo said, I THINK in Pascal. Procedures and functions and objects.

I haven’t looked at Mercury, but I really like Oxygene.

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Wow, you’re not some average programmer then :wink:

Thank you for sharing your background story! I always find it interesting to read someone’s programming career/experience :slight_smile:

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I was re-reading this and thought, VB programmers aren’t lazy. C-like programmers are always complaining that the VB syntax is too verbose. So we have to type more characters … That’s not lazy :slight_smile:

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