It was the same thing with us, when programming in Apple Basic and MS-DOS Basic. There is nothing wrong with tinkering around and getting interested in a field. I agree that VS is not the be-all-to-end-all, but it has its purpose, and it is not bad for this kid to get interested in something. It stinks taking the first couple years of computer science because they make you do a lot of work for very little payoff. The payoff is what you get when you use VS because you can see the immediate results. When you are writing a heap sort or a compression algorithm, it seems like an endless task that will get you nowhere, but when you apply those principles to the Visual environment, you can make a masterpiece. It is amazing what is possible, and just because you can do it the difficult way, does not mean that it is any better if you spend hours slaving over a user interface or you let microsoft help you out a little. You can make code as complex as you like under that visual environment, but without using those tools, it makes programming much more difficult and not necessarily any better. Just my two cents worth.
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It was the same thing with us, when programming in Apple Basic and MS-DOS Basic. There is nothing wrong with tinkering around and getting interested in a field. I agree that VS is not the be-all-to-end-all, but it has its purpose, and it is not bad for this kid to get interested in something. It stinks taking the first couple years of computer science because they make you do a lot of work for very little payoff. The payoff is what you get when you use VS because you can see the immediate results. When you are writing a heap sort or a compression algorithm, it seems like an endless task that will get you nowhere, but when you apply those principles to the Visual environment, you can make a masterpiece. It is amazing what is possible, and just because you can do it the difficult way, does not mean that it is any better if you spend hours slaving over a user interface or you let microsoft help you out a little. You can make code as complex as you like under that visual environment, but without using those tools, it makes programming much more difficult and not necessarily any better. Just my two cents worth.