Cheap Software Languages for NT? 100
JeanBaptiste writes: "I work for a small company that refuses to spend the money on visual studio. I need this (or some other language) to do my job (which isn't programming), and for about a year now I have had to use borland C++ 3.0 for dos to do the things that need doing. I know C/pascal/basic from years ago, but have not had to write any programs for work until recently. My question: Are there any cheap/free programming languages that will make a stable winNT/2000 app?" Well, there's ActiveState, which has perl, python, and assorted other packages and tools.
Having your cake and eating it too (Score:2, Insightful)
- Independent contractors are responsible for their own payroll taxes
and red tape. This eases the paperwork burden on your employer, and at the
same time allows you to conceal a good deal of otherwise taxable income.
- The BSA, SPA, and other assorted Software Nazis can not enter a
private residence without a search warrant. It is nearly impossible
to get a search warrant to look for pirated software. Thus there is no way
to get caught doing this.
- Your employer is absolutely not liable for your use of pirated
software to do his work, as long as the software is not present on his own
premises. You are absolutely not liable unless the pirated software is
discovered, in which case the BSA must prove that you have never had
a license for the software (hard) and must get into your house to do so
(much harder). I have not been able to find a case in which a search
warrant was obtained to investigate personal/business use of pirated
software.
- You will be entitled to unlimited free updates of Visual Studio, as
long as Kazaa, Gnutella, and Freenet don't all collapse at once.
- Your employer may partially subsidize your broadband connection.
Another client of ours used a slightly different strategy: he used the Windows 2000 EFS (encrypted filesystem) to obscure the pirated copy of Office on each of the PCs in the workplace. His system administrator had a "remote panic button" which would lock down every system in the event of an audit. If the auditors can't break 3DES, they can't prove noncompliance and they would be forced to walk away empty-handed. Remember NOT to keep extra CD-R's of VS lying around if you use this technique.Whichever strategy you choose, I wish you the best of luck in exercising your fair use rights as a consumer.
/fug
Are you asking the right question? (Score:5, Insightful)
I am aware that commercial IDE environments for MS-Win32 development look nice and have many pleasing buttons, but where is the _real_ functionality?
I have seen _nice_ development front-end tools. I submit that you have not seen the range of tools available, and that your area of development has not required the real, heavy-duty tools which UNIX offers. Or, I should say, you have not _percieved_ this requirement, and the benefit which such tools would offer you in your development arena.
What you speak of (commercial Win32 IDE environments) offer:
- IDE with color syntax highlighting
- Online manuals for function calls and syntax elements
at a button-press
- Ability to arrange a GUI framework, and generate code for same,
by dragging some things about in a GUI fashion
- Compile and link projects with a button press
- Run and inspect (or interpret and inspect) programs with
a button press
Development environments in the UNIX world offer _always_:Pipeline-capable tools
A real scripting environment to put them together in powerful ways Said tools, used together as above, include:
automate project regeneration, recompilation of course of arbitrary nature (make, GNU Make)
automate project compilation/installation cross-platform, cross-OS (Imake, GNU autoconf)
programatically generate parsers and lexers (lex/flex, yacc/bison)
Check syntax/portability semantics (lint),
Pretty-print source code in various languages,
Find and print patterns (grep),
Extract strings from binaries (strings),
Index symbols in source code(ctags/etags),
Perform powerful macro expansions (preprocessing) of arbitrary nature (m4, notably), (and remember where you got the _C_ preprocessor from)
Create function libraries (of static/dynamically loaded nature, as supported by host OS) (ar, etc)
Generate documentation in (plaintext, HTML, PostScript, {La}TeX, others) programatically from source code (many free and commercial, 3rd party tools, portable to any UNIX),
High quality online documentation in the form of manpages, GNU texinfo/info documents, as well as any vendor-specific documentation in various formats.
...and others I or any other person familiar with the Unix environment could list Those were the basics, and available for _every_ UNIX. Notable higher-level environments worth noting include:
- Emacs: at a _minimum_, Emacs can be considered to be
an IDE of a very superior nature, with elisp
programming primitives for editor macros
of arbitrary complexity/sophistication/power.
Emacss' ability to create and use "major modes"
for editing of arbitrarily many different
languages in a language-specific, nice way,
with color syntax highlighting, etc, are
not matched by any PC-based IDE I have ever seen,
nor expect to.
- GDB: a debugger of certainly adequate power, able
to take advantage of UNIX environment concepts
such as core files, as well as debugging of
actively running programs (and work-in-progress
for debugging running _kernals_, both locally
and remotely).
Correct me if I am wrong as to state-of-the-
debugging-art outside of the UNIX world, but
I don't recall any mature tools for debugging
MS-Win32 (or Win16) device drivers, which are
analogous in difficulty and usefullness to
debug, and _very_nasty_ to get wrong...
- GCC: an eminently capable compiler, capable of
(K&R, ANSI) C, C++, and Objective C
(plus the languages using C as backend,
such as some Pascal compilers, etc)
Granted, this compiler has significant faults,
so do all MS-environment compilers I have heard of.
The big advantage though, is the cross-OS,
cross-platform compilation.
- Emacs + GDB + GCC + other tools integrated:
The GNU development environment is _very_
powerful, as an integrated system.
- NEXTSTEP/OpenStep: Interface Builder/Project Builder
a very powerful framework. Useful analogies
can be made to DELPHI, which you may be familiar with,
and which is based on Object Pascal rather than
Objective C.
I submit that, contrary to your assumption of MS-environment tool superiority, you are tool-starved outside the UNIX world, and many of your best tools (which are buried inside your comfy IDEs) are derived from UNIX tools.- You do not have enough tools.
- They are not available to use separately, low-level.
- You have no way to combine small, single-purpose,
low-level tools into larger useful units.
- Your tools are not mature by comparison
(read: buggy, unpredictable, undocumented, proprietary)
- Your higher-level tools are not built on a firm
basis (excellent low-level tools),
and if something breaks, it's REALLY REALLY BROKEN,
and you are mostly screwed unless you are intimate
with the vendor of the tool
Linux is the most developer friendly environment I have ever used, and I can't see why any serious software engineers would even consider Windows a viable alternative at all. It may take a bit of pursuading on your part, but the reduced cost and ease of coding for Linux make the decision a no-brainer.Mr. Uptime
Re:Having your cake and eating it too (Score:4, Insightful)
If it was _my_ company, I would just look for alternative software like OpenOffice. Shafting the BSA and Big Software* is definitely a good goal though.
* I'm officially coining the term Big Software (same evil connotation as Big Tobacco), if it hasn't be coined already.