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Is Visual Basic a Good Beginner's Language?
Austin Milbarge asks: "Ever since the .NET framework came along a few years ago, Microsoft had promised VB developers that their language would finally be taken seriously. To be honest, I never understood why some non-VB developers thought of VB as a 'toy' language, but that is for another article. Anyways, Microsoft made good on their promise and transformed VB from an easy to learn language into an object oriented power house, with lots of OOP functionality thrown in. The old VB has been discontinued, and the new VB is no longer a simple language. With all the fancy changes, is VB still the great beginner's language it once was? Would you recommend it to a beginner over C#?"
Object Pascal is a good language for beginners. It has strong typing and object-oriented features, but the typing isn't strict to the point of being obnoxious like in Java. It is lower level, so you will deal some with pointers and memory management but it is harder to make a mess with than C/C++. You can also visually design the UI of your application, but the language isn't a disaster like VB (and doesn't run in a VM like C# or Java, so it's quick).
VB.NET is not the same language as the VB of yesteryear. It's semantically the same as C#, just with a somewhat VB-like syntax to ease VB programmers into working with .NET.
.NET framework from scratch, I can see no reason to choose VB.NET over C#, unless you happen to like VB-like keywords more than Java-like keywords.
If you're learning to code using the
-Stephen
There is a lot of devil in the details of that almost, however. C# has developer API comments yet VB.NET does not. VB.NET has more support for shadowing than C#. C# has useful convenience functions like using that VB.NET does not. VB.NET has convenience functions for late binding (considered harmful) and case-insensitive string comparisons that C# does not. C# has more object oriented features such as operator overloading that VB.NET does not. The list goes on and on.
I totally disagree. Difficult? Complicated? Sure, but not mean. People who have learned assembler are the ones who understand why
will usually run faster thaneven though both are conceptually identical. There are many things that seem perfectly reasonable in high-level languages that turn out to be a really bad idea once you learn what's going on in the hardware. I'm sure it's possible to learn that stuff without hitting the metal a few times, but I've never, not one single time, ever met someone who's done so.Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
Time to update to .net 2.0. A lot of the discrepencies that you mention are now gone.
In Republican America phones tap you.
I second that, Python is easy on the beginers but, I still think that to make a good programmer you need to teach him/her 2 languages. C first and then Python. The reasoning behind this is that C teaches a lot of basic (easy and complex ) things such a variable and memory, functions, types, stucture, control flow.... It shows new programmers a lot of concepts that are part of the majority of languages (Even just a Subset of features). After new programmers have done it the hard way, Python is great to start talking about OOP, Data structures, Algorithm... Since it's a pretty quick to code most things in python and that it removes the major pain of memory management, it allows for quick and easy learning of some more complex topic like those I have just mentioned. Finally I say that learning C and Python will allow most to learn any other language in a short period of time. It makes well rounded people. Java is also quite nice for beginers. But C and Python are just more usefull together. They fit in more places. Nic
Keep in mind that VBA is used with MS-Office applications, and VBScript is used on IE designed web pages which are related to Visual BASIC. Learning one, can help you learn the others.
.NET Framework, and it is turned into native code in the final compiltion. Visual BASIC.NET no longer has the bottleneck that Classic Visual BASIC had, and as a result it runs faster.
.NET framework. Visual BASIC can be used as a stepping stone to a different language, or it can be used for main development.
Visual BASIC.NET was a rewrite of Classic Visual BASIC, which added in C++ type error trapping, objects, and other things that many have criticised Classic Visual BASIC for not having. Many VB developers want Microsoft to continue to support Visual BASIC 6.0 or Classic Visual BASIC, but Microsoft wants to move on.
BASIC stands for Beginners All Symbolic Instruction Code, the first word is for beginners. It was not designed to be anything but a learning tool, like Pascal, Pilot, and many other languages were designed to be. Microsoft used it for early Microcomputers, and then made a GW-BASIC version of it for MS-DOS and then later QBASIC or Quick BASIC for MS-DOS 5.0 and above. Many considered GW-BASIC and QBASIC to be free versions of BASIC and developed for them. Microsoft released Visual BASIC 1.0 and many BASIC developers adapted to it. I recall learning MS-Access 1.0 and using a form of Visual BASIC for applications for it, which they called Access BASIC or something.
Borland picked up the Pascal craze, in colleges they taught Pascal for data structures courses. There was UCSD Pascal, but Borland came out with Turbo Pascal and it worked faster than most Pascal compilers. Object Pascal became Delphi by Borland, and it is still popular and a competitor to Visual BASIC. Free Pascal tries to use Object Pascal to be more like Delphi and the Lazarus project uses an IDE with Free Pascal to work like Delphi or Visual BASIC.
I think there is an XBASIC out there that works like Classic Visual BASIC. Someone made a GNOME BASIC. The Novell Mono project has a Visual BASIC.NET language which is used on Windows, Linux, Mac OSX, *BSD Unix, etc.
The whole argument against Visual BASIC is now moot. Classic Visual BASIC lacked proper OOP, but Visual BASIC.NET fixes that, but at the cost of learning new programming methods and syntax for Classic Visual BASIC developers. While designed for beginners, Visual BASIC has extended itself. Visual BASIC.NET uses a compiler very much designed like C# or C++ to compile into IL (Interprited Language) code (which is like assembly language) to run on the
You will be shocked to find that most businesses use Visual BASIC.NET for the same reasons that they used to use COBOL, it is easy to learn, uses English words, and almost anyone can learn it.
Still don't discount C#, C++, Java, Python, Perl, and many others, they can interface with Visual BASIC via the
Remember, Slashdot does not have a -1 disagree moderation, and no, troll, flamebait, and overrated are not substitutes.
Have you programmed in .NET because I find it hard to believe.
.toupper) on both strings or preferably using string.compare(string1, string2, true).
.NET 2.0 does have operator overloading.
C# has useful convenience functions like using that VB.NET does not
VB.NET has imports which is mostly the same as C# using. It lets you short cut your code, but does not allow aliasing like C# using.
VB.NET has convenience functions for late binding (considered harmful) and case-insensitive string comparisons that C# does not.
VB.NET string comparison is case sensitive by default. Ex "abc" = "ABC" would evaluate as false. In C# or VB.NET you would perform case insensitive string comparisons the same way, either using string.tolower(or
C# has more object oriented features such as operator overloading that VB.NET does not
VB.NET in
C# has developer API comments yet VB.NET does not
There are about a dozen free addin for visual studio to perform this task.
I believe the "using" the poster was talking about was the C# keyword that provides automatic .Dispose() execution once the block is out of scope. It's a shortcut for wrapping the code in a try-finally and calling Dispose() in the finally.
// work
// work
For example if SomeClass implemented IDisposable:
using (SomeClass x = new SomeClass())
{
}
would be equivalent to
SomeClass x = new SomeClass();
try
{
}
finally
{
x.Dispose();
}
Scheme and this book.
Sorry, but this is a very wrong view of what computer science or programming really are. There are three things being mixed up here which are largely separate bodies of knowledge and any decent computer science program separates them out as such.
Algorithms - This is the core of Computer Science; learning to think like a programmer and to break problems down into logical chunks is tantamount to becoming a computer scientist. With this at the core, a language should then be chosen that most facilitates this. When I started college 10 years ago we used Pascal in our lab for our algorithms courses (which notably were just about implementing the theory we covered in the course), and that at the time was a very sane choice. Java's a pretty sane choice these days. Lots of things are really, but something like C forces people trying to learn how to think in algorithms to be side tracked by all of the tedious low level junk. (For reference, I'm a low-level C systems programmer at a large software company, so this isn't some "C sucks" wankery.)
Computer Organization - This is usually cross listed in electrical or computer engineering, and for good reason. This is where you figure out how hardware works. C and assembler (RISC works fine here) are appropriate in such a course. As this course naturally follows introductory algorithms courses, you can here put the theoretical constructs learned there in context.
Operating Systems - Memory management doesn't belong in either of the above and certainly saying that you learn "memory management" with C is pretty silly. You learn how to malloc and free stuff. Whoopee. "Memory management", in any sort of interesting way, is better treated in an Operating Systems course where you can track what exactly is happening down from the programming language, into the OS and finally at the hardware side. It can be put in context of what actually happens when you call malloc and what that means. Fundamentally, you don't understand anything more about memory management from a basic C course than if somebody tells you in a Java course "When you use 'new' some memory will be allocated, and when you're done with that object there's a thing called a garbage collector that will eventually come and give that memory back." Memory management is a non-trivial topic and one that certainly goes deeper than simple allocation.
So, is VB suitable for any of this? Not really. VB is kind of orthogonal. Like you said, it's fine for someone who needs to solve certain sets of tasks, but doesn't want or need to bother with really understanding deeper concepts.