This is to both John and Chris...

>Tell me precisely what he said about snippets that was not factual.. Here is the relevant quote...
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>***
>I decided to take a couple of solitary days to try an experiment. I loaded up Delphi 4 (a very good development environment) and C++ Builder 2 (a close cousin of Delphi) and attempted to duplicate one of my current dBASE projects. I even dusted off old copies of Visual FoxPro and Visual Basic.
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>It was not fun. Though each of the products let me duplicate (approximately) my Visual dBASE 7 application, none of them could do it with native controls (add-ons required!). None of them even got close in terms of productivity. Each one was missing some key feature I'd grown to love in dBASE: C++ string handling is amateur compared to dBASE. Delphi's arrays are rigid and uncompromising compared to dBASE. VFP's editors work with "snippets", not with source code files and VB has no inheritance. One-way tools were painful to use.
>***
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>If Katz worked with the visual designer, you do in fact work with snippets. Again, you may not like what he said, but he is not off base. He is factually correct..

I think what Chris was saying is that we haven't worked with "snippets" in a long time. Technically, when we look at methods displayed in the visual designer, yes, indeed, they are fragments of the whole, and can be called "snippets." However, that particular term hasn't been used in years; we now edit "methods." I guess where the perceived "bashing" lies is that Katz shouldn't have "dusted off old copies of Visual FoxPro and Visual Basic"--leading the current VFP developer to conclude that perhaps he should have used current versions.

IAC, when someone can boil a whole experiment down to one paragraph, and blanket say that everything needed add-ons, that another product has "amateur" features, and references old terminology and versions -- and attempted to duplicate a current project (how long has he been working on the project?) in *four* different languages in "a couple of solitary days" -- it seems to me that the whole experiment and the language used in the write-up is biased. OF COURSE I would have problems duplicating my projects in languages I don't use! And to devote less than a DAY to experimenting with each language? Please--this can't be completely objective.

And if these two paragraphs aren't objective, what can I make of the rest of the story?

Was Katz "bashing" the other development environments? Well, he wasn't *overtly* bashing them. Was this an objective comparision? Nope. The *way* Katz made the comparisons -- giving minimal detail, and choosing his words to ensure a lesser desireability -- indicates a lack of objectivity. If he did do a completely objective study, he sure blew it when he wrote up the results. It's not just WHAT is said; HOW it is said is important, too.

- della