If that doesn’t ring a bell, it’s from the Reagan /Carter debates in the 1980 election cycle. Carter had presented a string of criticisms of Reagan’s positions, which Reagan pretty much dismissed with that statement.

Back in the heyday of client/server development, the folks at Borland released a hit piece on PowerBuilder written by a Delphi advocate. You can still find a copy of it as a series of articles on the CodeGear site.

They’ve revised the title so it no longer indicates that it’s comparing PowerBuilder 5.0 and Delphi 2.0. For that matter, even though PowerBuilder 5.0 was out (and compiled to machine code) the benchmark tests in the paper were done using PowerBuilder 4.0. Then again, when you read statements that indicate that PowerBuilder is not object-oriented and does not support inheritance, you’re pretty much left saying “there you go again.” (The statement in the paper is that the PowerScript scripting language is neither of those, neglecting to note that a scripting language wouldn’t and the tool does.)

Why bring up that ancient history? Because currently the folks at IdeaBlade are hosting their own “Moving to .NET from PowerBuilder: A Perspective for Client/Server Developers” white paper, which is a “high-level overview of how PowerBuilder developers can migrate to .NET and smart-client development” using their products. (As an aside, in an earlier editorial on whether RAD is dead, I noted how newer products keep comparing their RAD capabilities to PowerBuilder. The IdeaBlade white paper is no different, another indication that RAD is not dead. Even Microsoft, when promoting their latest version of Visual Studio, makes RAD one of the major selling points.

I think it’s always good to evaluate these white papers because they can contain useful criticism, pointing out areas where the product does need to improve. For example, the Borland paper did note that PowerBuilder didn’t provide exception handling capabilities, something Sybase finally rectified in PowerBuilder 8.0 (and wasn’t supported in machine code compiles until PowerBuilder 10.0).