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#?"

Re:No.

[ObsessiveMathsFreak]

....plus it lets learners go straight into OO and learn good practices.

Or run, screaming in mental agony from the building as their virgin eyes behold the Java "Hello World" app.

10 PRINT "FIRST POST!"

[Anonymous Coward]

20 GOTO 10

And in other questions...

[edremy]

Dear Republican National Committee: Would Hillary be a good president?

Dear Osama Bin Laden: Would you like to come to my bar mitzvah?

Dear Eagles fans: Would you be willing to sign Terrell Owens again?

Re:Is Visual Basic a good beginner's language

[The_Wilschon]

I hate when people make statements sound like questions and vice versa?

Re:still C

[beavis88]

*sniff* brings back memories of my first C program

% ./a.out
Segmentation Fault
%

Re:Yes.

[edmicman]

Wow, I would have to agree. Your comment reminds me of going through 4 years of school, learning C, java, some assembly, etc. Sure, I could do the educational tasks with it, but I wanted something I could *show* people. "Look at how I can parse this string" or "watching me simulate a computer chip - look at the flashing lights!" just doesn't have an appeal. Enter the MS tools. I think VB would be a decent starting language just because you are able to *do something* that is neat fairly easily. C# would probably be just as easy to dive right into, too, and probably has more potential to do advanced things down the road. Or, in a different vein, start off with a scripting language like ASP or PHP. You can get your feet wet in actually writing *something*, and see results immediately, too. And a personal web server is simple to set up. Good luck!

Re:Bad idea- compilers

[wizbit]

and I can always tell the difference in code between a real programmer and Visual Studio Wizards

So can I. The #Region " Windows Form Designer generated code " seems to be a bit of a giveaway, no?

Re:And in other questions...

[lucabrasi999]

She is the ugly woman version of John Kerry. Bland. Impotent. Pandering.....Plus, she is bat-shit insane.

Come on, quit holding back. How do you really feel about her?

Re:still C

[Ratbert42]

$ cat test.c
#include
int main()
{
    printf("Hello world\n");
}
$ gcc -o test test.c
$ test
$

Worked for me.

[Stoutlimb]

"Honey, you'll still be a virgin if you do it THIS way..."

Worked for me.

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

VB.NET actually runs faster than C#

[Anonymous Coward]

... by about 6 weeks.

Re:still C

[iphayd]

Oh come on.  You know you commented it.

#include    //Most people put <stdio.h> in this line after #include, but I can't due to a software patent.
int main()  //Main function is run every time
{           //Begin Main function
    printf("Hello world\n"); //Print "Hello World" and start a new line
}           //End Main Function

No.

[Werrismys]

It's proprietary, runs on one platform only, and it's basic (on steroids).

Re:still C

[el cisne]

Flipping brilliant! Thank you. Ahh, yes, the memories. Innocently asking the TA "What's a seg fault?" Innocence was soon dashed, as the Holy K&R I consumed.

Java snobs?

[PhYrE2k2]

for those of you C++/Java snobs that think VB/C# are for morons

Please don't associate those Java users with us C++ (and C for the procedural of us) users.
*shudders* I feel so dirty.

Re:still C

[cdrudge]

You forgot to put your name, class, and project number up at the top of the file as comments. You will also lose point for not properly documenting the method's in and out parameters and how they might be modified. Finally, you also did not declare the "Hello World\n" as a constant to ease modification at a later point in time.

...or at least that was the way my first Hello World program was graded (although that was in C++).

Re:still C

[stoicio]

You failed to notice that he doesn't *return* anything
from main, which is declared as 'int main'.

You fail the test!

In-depth answer

[Trogre]

no

Re:still C

[ignavus]

Oh, you mean...?

#include <stdio.h>

int main() {
    printf("Segmentation Fault\n");
    return 1;
}

Re:Visual Basic is horrible; use Python

[ignavus]

Makes a great starter pet, too.

With apologies to Douglas Hofstadter..

[Ztream]

Question: Is Visual Basic still a good beginners language?
Answer: Mu.

Never improve on perfection :)

[CarpetShark]

You introduced a bug ;)

That should return EXIT_FAILURE or something, not 1.

stats on these responses

[Chapter80]

Out of curiosity, I did a quick, rough word find on the responses that have been posted.

Here are my estimates after running through a few that I was curious about:

Java 500 Python 180 Ruby 120

Notes:
- I counted on a few pages, and estimated the rest.
- This was strictly a word find, so Java and JavaScript would both show up above (and yet, I understand that they are different languages). For this reason, I couldn't easily count C or VB/Visual Basic.
- Some people mentioned the same language by name multiple times, and thus got counted multiple times.
- Mentioning that "LanguageX sucks" would still register a count for LanguageX. Further, a message with the Subject "Re: Python", that said "No, try Ruby" would count once for Python and once for Ruby.
- I am not trying to make any point with this, other than seeing which languages people are mentioning. Someone might want to run a more elaborate test, as this has no statistical significance.
- This message was constructed to the same number of references to each language counted, so if someone wants to count again, I don't throw off the count much (for the languages mentioned - even LanguageX).