Friday, May 29, 2009

Visual Basic is Evil

 At some level, this is simply axiomatic.  After all, it is a Microsoft product.  But seriously folks...

I had been developing an application to manage the book cart I help run at church, and I've been developing it in Visual Basic .Net.  A relatively easy process.  Recently, a portion of a project I've been working on at the office looks like it should have a custom program as a solution (a small program, mind you).  I was going to rollout VB for it, but it seems that the new standard in the group is C#.

In order to learn C# quickly, I figured the best approach would be to port the book cart application over to C#.  There are programs you can buy to do this, but since there were a relatively small number of forms to recreate, I simply rebuilt them and have been redoing the code to make it C#.  Since it has been a couple of years since I touched Java (which is quite similar to C#), I mistakenly assumed most of the code could just be copied, with the addition of some semicolons and braces.  Oops.

What I had forgotten is how sloppy VB allows you to be.  Data hiding?  No, everything is pretty much open for other objects in the system to manipulate.  If I don't want object b to be able to directly manipulate the controls or properties of object a, I have to take steps to prevent it.  Casting of variables?  VB seems to handle anything you throw at it.  Rarely does it not get what you're trying to do, even if you don't.

So, why is this evil.  Realistically for small individual apps like I'm dealing with, its fairly irrelevant.  There will not be other coders working on this, and the complexity won't be such that I need be concerned with breaking something via direct manipulation.  However, I really had to stop and think about what I was doing when dealing with C#.  I had become so very sloppy in my programming habits, simply because VB lets you.  I suspect VB was developed for rapid development of small programs by less than well trained programmers, something it is very good for.  Unfortunately, if you want to become a well trained programmer, I think VB probably harms you more than it helps.

Monday, May 11, 2009

A Little Liturgical History

 9.West and I have conversations occasionally about the historicity of hymns and prayers etc.  How far back do certain texts date.  With Orthodox hymns and prayers, I often don't know specifics, although generally most are pretty old.  For instance, our Liturgy dates largely back to St. John Chrysostom, who modified an earlier liturgy.  However, some things have been added over time, and hymns - especially for Saints - are developed over time.

Last week I was listening to a series of Podcasts on Church/State relations and learned a small piece of liturgical history that I thought was interesting.

There are three antiphons in the Divine Liturgy.  Traditionally they involve a series of Psalm verses interspersed with a refrain.  For the most part, except in monasteries, the psalm verses are no longer sung, but the refrains have been retained.  The refrain for the first antiphon is  "By the intercessions of the Theotokos, Savior, save us", the second antiphonal refrain is "Save us, O Son of God, (who rose from the dead)*, to You we sing: Alleluia.  The third antiphon consists of the Apolytikia - the hymns appointed for the day and leads directly to the small entrance where the Gospels are processed into the altar.

After the second antiphonal hymn, there is another brief hymn, which was apparently added a bit later.  This hymn is, "Only begotten Son and Word of God, although immortal You humbled Yourself for our salvation, taking flesh from the holy Theotokos and ever virgin Mary and, without change, becoming man.  Christ, our God, You were crucified but conquered death by death.  You are one of the Holy Trinity, glorified with the Father and the Holy Spirit - save us."