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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#?"
Python has been suggested. I also fall in the camp that say that python is probably the best learner language. Interpreter is freely available for all popular platforms. Python has enough of the niceties of VB (no strong types, easy array/dictionary construction, etc) while having enough features of a "real" programming language (shared memory, forking, etc) to teach about the concepts.
Developing in an IDE like VS obfuscates and distances the programmer from the code. It's a necessary evil for developing some things. But throwing a learning user at the bubbly GUI to figure out the wizards for him/herself is akin to putting a new pilot in the seat of a 747. There is just too much there that would seem confusing.
For these three reasons I would suggest python:
1. All you need is a free (as in speech) interpreter and your favorite text editor.
2. Documentation, howtos, sample code is easily available (there are plenty of good VB help sites out there, but I have found many many many fantastic samples of python).
3. The syntax of VB and python would seem similar enough to a beginner.
On the other hand, I would not recommend a beginner to use Visual Studio or any of the IDE where you drag-and-drop to program.
Yeah, because programming boilerplate includes, class, main, and event handling code (which does nothing on its own) is really going to get someone hooked. Screw that. Give that code to a new programmer for free and let them add in something that does something fun, obvious, and interesting right away. That's how you'll get 'em hooked.
Look at it this way... no-one got hooked on pot because they liked making bongs.
Rapid Application Development. Tools like Visual Basic and other 4GL langauges were intended to improve software development speed and accuracy by providing tools whereby the computer automatically did as much of the work as possible. The most common type of RAD tool was GUI Builders like Visual Basic. (Though there were quite a few for database development, networking, gaming, and other areas.)
The primary issue with such tools is that they tend to fail spectacularly as soon as they get outside their intended area of use. Visual Basic, for example, came along just in time to be abused for Client/Server development. Since VB wasn't designed with networking in mind, it was often faster and easier to do the code in C (and later Java). VB's life as a GUI front-end was extended thanks to the ability to link in COM+/ActiveX controls for more complex tasks, but GUIs eventually morphed into far more complex variants that the GUI Builder couldn't easily support. (Ever notice how you can spot a Visual Basic application visually?)
At that point, most serious programmers realized that they were taking longer to hack VB to do what they wanted rather than just coding it from scratch in another language. So they gave up on it and moved back to C/C++/Delphi and the new-kid-on-the-block, Java.
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
C?? Pleas...
:p). The issues that you're talking about are becoming more and more irrelevant, just as machine-language programming did (for 99.9999% of source code).
If you want to learn the *fundamentals* of programming, Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs is the best book I've seen, and it deals not at all with "memory management", "efficient use of resources", or other archane crap (since it uses Scheme
Not that Scheme itself is used much beyond the academic. But a lot if its ideas are showing up in modern programming platforms that are much in use (memory management, closures, etc). I wouldn't tout scheme as a "beginning programming language" but I'd tout it as a "programming language to learn the fundamentals of programs for a potential CS major". I'd tout C for neither.
-- "I never gave these stories much credence." - HAL 9000