case for open lang on win32 - fill in the table

[nielsenjf at my-deja.com]

I've decided to expand the table with comments and code examples
including compiled languages.
(though I'll probably need help with the vb examples :-)

I hope to show that you can use open languages rather than
vbscript or visual basic and have just as easy or easier time
doing it that using proprietary stuff with the benefits of more
power and cross-platform (Where I work we're going 100% microsoft and
100% visual basic). The main argument being visual basic/vbscript is so
easy to use and the only other viable option is C++ which is too hard
(in their opinion).

IMHO, python has a feel similar vb/vbscript except it doesn't have
the vb world's limitations.

Now of course, reality may not match my ideas that (maybe you really
have to use vbscript and visual basic to function the best in their
closed world). However, on first inspection it doesn't look that way.
There is actually very little supporting vbscript.

For example, you can do everything COMwise in C++.
Choose any other language and you start to make compromises.
What is there that you can do in C++ that you can't do in python?
In what cases is visual basic(a probably weaker language) better than
python to use?

> IDispatch plus about 100 extra interfaces.  We can not use raw
interfaces if
> there is no C++ support, but many useful interfaces already have that
> support (and it is trivial to add new ones).  From a marketting POV,
this
> should definately read "yes" :-)

When you say C++ support, I assume you mean there is code written than
allows vtable access for python for some interfaces?

Is there c++ support for ADSI or MTS or OLEDB (which look to be the big
things for windows 2000)? Or can we only access it via Idispatch(I know
perl can do some stuff w/ADSI via Idispatch).

OLDEDB access would be cool since ADO is so slow.
Perl has dbi to fix that problem.

> >> COM threading       STA only          STA only?    STA only?
>
> No - full support for all COM threading models.  STA is the default.

Great. I think even visual basic is stuck in the STA.

> >> project size        small to medium   big          big
> >> (lines of code)
> >
> >What does that mean, lines of code? for COM, or in general?
>
> Agreed = I would have to argue "small", especially compared to VB.
For
> _anything_ other than GUI code (which VBScript doesnt do anyway) the
LOC for
> a Python solution will always be smaller than for VB.

I guess that was ambigous. It should be broken up into 2 things.

Maximum size of project you can use it with:
It looks like python projects can get huge.

Amount of code needed to solve a problem:
(for example in the recent Practice of Programming book, perl, java,C,
c++ and others were compared, with perl being the fastest except for
raw C code, but it only needed a fraction of the code. Java was slowest
and needed a lot of code).


> Hope this helps...  Let us know if you complete this and post it to
the web.

Will do, thanks a lot for your help.

john


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