When academia says something is not important all it means is they do not have the budget to afford it and they do not have the pull to get the budget to afford it. Hand them a fat grant of someone else’s money to pay for it and they will love it.
I have nothing against academia but their interests are heavily skewed from the rest of the market.
[quote=329441:@Phillip Zedalis]When academia says something is not important all it means is they do not have the budget to afford it and they do not have the pull to get the budget to afford it. Hand them a fat grant of someone else’s money to pay for it and they will love it.
I have nothing against academia but their interests are heavily skewed from the rest of the market.[/quote]
Or their ego is obstructing their view of progress
Back in the day before VB became big for in-house apps he probably would have said the same thing about it…
Syntax is mostly about the tradeoff between (in no specific order) learning curve/readability/lines of code/coding speed/maintainability…
How those factors balance depend on the individual so is very subjective.
IMO, as an academic his evaluation on it should have been based less on his syntax preferences and more on concepts/data structures/abstractions/capabilities and the strengths and limitations of those design choices.
Did he say much about is evaluation of those types of things? If it was mainly syntax he was not doing an objective evaluation…
Which is fine for a personal decision about using it or not (It’s why I use Xojo), but IMO not for making the type of statements he did.
(Bet he would like the new framework better! 
)