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The Birth of Visual Basic (2006)

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Re: The Birth of Visual Basic (2006)

#31

Post by jfroma »

japhyr wrote: post #13

I'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…

I started on VB5/6 and I wouldn't recommend it now, but I believe the language is not that important but the general concepts. Vb6 is a weird language nowadays because is very bad at OOP, is not functional, etc.

Another reason I'd discourage it, is because the language is tied to the IDE/editor and is very difficult to do something without it. Also there is not opensource community around vb6 and there is not much code to look at or to contribute in github. Even if the 'new project' dialog offers you several types of applications the language is very limited to desktop applications and com components.

VB.Net is very good and modern language and it has some interesting features.

I'd rather introduce programming in a nix environment using the unix way, write a shebang here and pick the language you would like to use. Learn file descriptors, stdin stdout stderr, process exit status, pipes, etc. Learn to write small libraries and programs that solve very specifics problems.

Re: The Birth of Visual Basic (2006)

#32

Post by vlad »

Stratoscope wrote: post #24

This is the most complete and interesting account I've seen about the beginnings of VB from the Microsoft side. I don't know how I missed it until now, but I'm glad it was posted here. Source and disclaimer: I'm the "Ruby development 'wizard'" mentioned in the article. Apparently I helped the VB team learn how to code for Windows! I didn't know that until now, but I'm glad I could help. To amplify on a few points in…

Draggable arrows reminded me of XCode's Interface Builder.

Re: The Birth of Visual Basic (2006)

#33

Post by johnm111888 »

buckbova wrote: post #18
japhyr wrote: post #13

I'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 n…

From my experience VBAs used a lot in the corporate world. Learning VB in high school can be of great use in the future if you're not looking for a tech career. Front-end MS Access, Excel Macros, screen-scraping, vb script to call SQL queries can all give you a leg up in a non programming career path.

Re: The Birth of Visual Basic (2006)

#34

Post by j_s »

DodgyEggplant wrote: post #28

VB was about getting stuff done. Ugly, awkward, convoluted, nowhere near a real programming language. But, the things you could build. Fast. In no time, you had something that worked, installed anywhere, no approvals, no app-stores, no complicated deployments. Microsoft miserably failed to scale it to the web, and with some efforts - to mobile. They just drove developers away, and till today we do not have a similar…

I copied the following comment onto a post-it: "stop trying to be clever and start trying to be done"

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7602816 (6 months ago on Boring Systems Build Badass Businesses)

Re: The Birth of Visual Basic (2006)

#35

Post by Xophmeister »

japhyr wrote: post #13

I'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…

In my opinion, the only thing classic VB had going for it -- and even that's a bit of a stretch -- is the relatively interactive feedback loop of UI designing, coding and debugging, which leads to somewhat quick gratification. However, the language is kludgy and antiquated; I feel like it encourages antipatterns and generally bad style. VB.net may be a bit better (I'm not familiar with it), as that still has the interactivity, but most of the language warts have been patched over; but then one could argue, "Why not C#"?... To answer your first question, if you want to teach programming, I would avoid VB like the plague! (Annoyingly, Excel and the like are still all scripted in VBA -- which is very similar to classic VB -- so it does have some commercial merit.)

I think Python is a very good choice as a first programming language; although, if it were me, I would also segue into a bit of C so that the learners can appreciate the difference between static and dynamic typing. What Python (and C) lacks is an idiot-proof GUI designer like VB has. (I know there are obviously things like PyGTK+ with Glade, but it's not nearly as easy as VB's form designer.) Like I said in my previous paragraph, the near-instant gratification of creating a working -- albeit trivial -- program with a visual component really encourages learners to delve deeper. A Python console application will come across as boring, at best.

As for your A/B testing: I believe the VB group will not really understand what it means to program, whereas the Python group -- while harder to encourage -- will have a much more solid foundation on which to build.

Re: The Birth of Visual Basic (2006)

#36

Post by jasode »

zamalek wrote: post #25
jasode wrote: post #9

It'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…

> Visual Basic v1.0 hit that perfect sweet spot for a bunch of refugees from the DOS text mode 4GL languages to write Windows programs. They didn't have to learn the low-level C language or mess around for months with the Petzold book. Visual Basic had this ingenious abstraction called "forms" that hid the WndProc() monster and its messy switch case statements VB also hit that sweet spot with me. I had no prior advan…

>I struggle to find a recent language that he can pick up and start having a rewarding experience, like I did with VB.

For kids, I recommend Javascript in the web browser. My friend is showing it to his 10-year old son and it's working out great. Javascript benefits include free development tool (notepad or textmate) and cross-platform (Win/Mac/Linux). Javascript will be around for the next 50 years. In my opinion, all the other candidate languages (Python, VB, C#, Java Android, etc) have too much friction in terms of setup (download, then install, etc).

One drawback is that it's hard to deploy Javascript as a self-contained exe unless you include paid tools such as Adobe Flex with ActionScript. (That was another strength of VB -- the ability to compile to an exe with a small msvbvm.dll dependency.)

But then again, a lot of kids have their own smartphones so he could type out a Javascript game on the pc, fire up a web server on the home wifi, and then point his phone's web browser to it. Instant deployment and gratification.

Re: The Birth of Visual Basic (2006)

#37

Post by smacktoward »

roywiggins wrote: post #20
japhyr wrote: post #13

I'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 therefo…

> 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.

Yeah, but my feeling has always been that, if you drew a line called "complexity" with VB6 on one end and C# on the other, VB.Net would be much closer to the C# end. Which sort of calls into question what the benefit of learning VB.Net is; for nearly the same amount of effort, you could just learn C# and benefit from all the additional tooling and support options that C# offers.

The big draw of VB through version 6 was precisely that it wasn't a "real" language -- it was much, much simpler than a "real" language, and therefore so easy to learn that practically anybody could do it. VB.Net on the other hand always felt more like they just put C# into a T-shirt that says "I'M WITH STUPID."

Re: The Birth of Visual Basic (2006)

#38

Post by wsc981 »

Spearchucker wrote: post #8
jimmaswell wrote: post #2

vb.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.

"...it's just a less powerful... ...c#..." How so? I use both (my largest C# project was Nokia Maps, largest VB.Net project is my own database + sync engine, at ~110kloc, spread across Windows Desktop, Windows Phone and WCF sync engine). I've not come across any shortcomings in comparison to C#. Granted I'm using the free editions of Visual Studio, and avoid any third-party components or code. What am I missing?

I think you can probably achieve the same results with VB compared to C#, but at the cost of writing more code or slower performance.

Re: The Birth of Visual Basic (2006)

#39

Post by edtechdev »

anigbrowl wrote: post #22

VB was a crappy language because of Basic, but if you could get over that it was a really nice IDE for rapid prototyping I loved the forms paradigm. I wonder what people consider the current leader in this area.

It's still VB http://www.tiobe.com/index.php/content/paperinfo/tpci/index....

For 'rapid prototyping' of a website, I guess that would be Wordpress.

Re: The Birth of Visual Basic (2006)

#40

Post by was_hellbanned »

johnm111888 wrote: post #33
buckbova wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 n…

From my experience VBAs used a lot in the corporate world. Learning VB in high school can be of great use in the future if you're not looking for a tech career. Front-end MS Access, Excel Macros, screen-scraping, vb script to call SQL queries can all give you a leg up in a non programming career path.

I have an older relative who is still cashing in nicely on his VBA skills. There was a "demand vs pay" graph for tech skills going around awhile. VBA is low demand, but among the highest paid of the technologies.
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