The Silent Majority: Why Visual Basic 6 Still Thrives (2012)
The Birth of Visual Basic (2006)
11–20 of 61 posts
Re: The Birth of Visual Basic (2006)
#12Interesting that the name Ruby was already claimed (like Go). I guess no one in Ruby On Rails thought to check.
Wikipedia puts Ruby at 1993. I think it's reasonable to assume that Matz hadn't heard of a project that started not much earlier.
"I guess" you didn't think to check.
Re: The Birth of Visual Basic (2006)
#13I'm a high school teacher, and I'd love to hear from some people who know Visual Basic well. I teach an intro programming class each year, and I currently use Python. I occasionally get students who have had a previous class in Visual Basic at another school. These students tend to think they already "know programming", but after two or three weeks in Python they start to tell me they're learning all kinds of concepts they didn't know about, and they say they're enjoying programming in Python more than Visual Basic. There are lots of variables in their experience though, so it's hard to tell exactly what is making programming more interesting to them.
My questions:
- Do you have any thoughts about people being introduced to Visual Basic as their first programming language?
- If one group of students are taught Visual Basic well, and another group is taught Python well, will all students come away with a decent grounding in programming?
I don't ask that as a language flame war, I'm honestly curious about how programming in the VB environment compares to languages I'm more familiar with such as Python, Java, C etc, especially for students who have no previous background in programming.
Re: The Birth of Visual Basic (2006)
#14vb.net is an odd language. Pretty much useless in a way because it's just a less powerful, oddly-syntaxed C#, after using it for a year at one point. Not a bad language but offers very little that C# doesn't, and is missing some. Handles statement was very nice though.
I encounter more and more vb.net because Microsoft uses it as their default "scripting" language for products like SQL Reporting Services. And for that, it actually seems to make sense as a language. In small sniplets it works better than C#.
But honestly Microsoft missed a huge opportunity by not simply making classic VB6 code run under the CLR. In entirely defeats the point of having a common language runtime if every language has to look exactly the same. It wouldn't have been an insurmountable project and would have driven higher the adoption of proper .NET.
Re: The Birth of Visual Basic (2006)
#15It's an interesting story but it's told as a "person A did this, Person B did that, and Person C had this idea, etc." Maybe it's a consequence how my brain works but any time I read that type of recap, I forget everyone's name and the other trivia 5 minutes after I'm done reading it. When revisiting technology history, what tends to stick in my mind is the context and industry forces prevalent at the time and the sto…
I agree. Thanks for taking the time tot write this nice summary!
Re: The Birth of Visual Basic (2006)
#16Interesting that the name Ruby was already claimed (like Go). I guess no one in Ruby On Rails thought to check.
Wikipedia puts Ruby at 1993. I think it's reasonable to assume that Matz hadn't heard of a project that started not much earlier. "I guess" you didn't think to check.
And I don't think the people "in" Ruby on Rails named Ruby!
Re: The Birth of Visual Basic (2006)
#17Interesting that the name Ruby was already claimed (like Go). I guess no one in Ruby On Rails thought to check.
Wikipedia puts Ruby at 1993. I think it's reasonable to assume that Matz hadn't heard of a project that started not much earlier. "I guess" you didn't think to check.
And I don't think the people "in" Ruby on Rails named Ruby!
Re: The Birth of Visual Basic (2006)
#18I'm a high school teacher, and I'd love to hear from some people who know Visual Basic well. I teach an intro programming class each year, and I currently use Python. I occasionally get students who have had a previous class in Visual Basic at another school. These students tend to think they already "know programming", but after two or three weeks in Python they start to tell me they're learning all kinds of concept…
Don't teach your kids VB. It's a dead end language. I don't think anyone should learn VB anymore and I doubt anyone is taught "well". There are classes in VB and modules. You can write functions and procedures. But something like python will serve you better into the future.
I took every computer course available to me through high school and graduating in the 90's that didn't give me much choice. The teachers were not that knowledgeable so I ended up doing Apple BASIC and QBASIC lessons out of books. Honestly didn't learn much.
I took a introduction to programming course in college which was in C. Most of the time I was fighting syntax errors to perform the most basic operations. I didn't learn much.
I eventually switched my major to computer science and took another 101 course, this time taught with C++. Still I fought segfaults and syntax but I actually learned the basics.
No moral to this story, just I wish I had python as a choice when I was learning.
Re: The Birth of Visual Basic (2006)
#19It's an interesting story but it's told as a "person A did this, Person B did that, and Person C had this idea, etc." Maybe it's a consequence how my brain works but any time I read that type of recap, I forget everyone's name and the other trivia 5 minutes after I'm done reading it. When revisiting technology history, what tends to stick in my mind is the context and industry forces prevalent at the time and the sto…
I'm a corporate neckbeard. Probably the opposite of everyone here. And a lurker, so hello!
I work for a company that ignored the industry trends, we picked a winner with "Petzold style" win32 as you put it. We have a 800kloc 20 year old codebase for a LOB product that hasn't had to be rewritten four times due to the abstraction of the hour being changed. No VB, MFC, no ATL, no Winforms, no C#, no WPF, no ASP, barely any COM.
The biggest irony of all of our intentional ignorance of technological progress is that our software works 100% perfectly on Wine on OSX and Linux. It also compiles with GCC under mingw32 and works natively on ReactOS bar a few problems with the OS.
Do all these magical abstractions and platforms do you any good?
I'm less convinced every day.
You're right about mindshare though and as a vendor, that is what pays the bills.
Going to fire up textpad, nmake, windbg and write some code now...
Re: The Birth of Visual Basic (2006)
#20I'm a high school teacher, and I'd love to hear from some people who know Visual Basic well. I teach an intro programming class each year, and I currently use Python. I occasionally get students who have had a previous class in Visual Basic at another school. These students tend to think they already "know programming", but after two or three weeks in Python they start to tell me they're learning all kinds of concept…
Are we talking VB6 or VB.NET?
VB6 is... old, and feels old. It barely allows object oriented programming and doesn't have first-class functions, so you're pretty limited to a procedural sort of paradigm. The IDE is clunky. For example: error handling is done with explicit GOTOs (ugh) and "On Error Resume Next" lets you simply skip past errors(!!!).
VB.NET is basically a friendlier-looking version of C# and is therefore not nearly as bad as VB6, has a real modern IDE, etc.
Python feels like a playground where you can explore; VB6 feels more like you're on a rail and the moment you fall off everything will break.