I’ve never understood people who think that Micro$oft Visual Basic is a good development environment. For me, VB is flawed. It is useless when one wants to write good quality code because the Basic language is too primitive (check the OO features for instance). And the GUI builder, while easy to use, only helps in producing non-compliant and, 9 times out of 10, plain ugly user interfaces. Sure, it’s nice to be able to prototype a small application in VB rapidly, but what you get is only a prototype and not commercial quality software.
And, this time, I have an ally. Alan Cooper, father of Visual Basic who, in his very interesting book The Inmates Are Running the Asylum says :
“Some software developers have arrived at the unfortunate conclusion that modern prototyping tools – like Visual Basic – are effective design tools. Rather than designing the product, they just whip out an extremely anemic version of it with a visual programming tool. This prototype typically becomes the foundation for the product. This trades away the robustness and life span of the product for an illusory benefit. You can get a better design with pencil and paper and a good methodology than you can with any amount of prototyping”
I have nothing to add :-)
lol this is fun, what language do you think is worth to be learnt?
Depends a lot… Choosing a programming language is very very subjective.
Personally, I like
* Ruby (or Python) for learning algorithms and basic (and not so basic) programming
* Java for learning object-oriented and GUI-related programming and the use of a vast class library
* Smalltalk to experience a real object-oriented environment
* Haskell for learning higher-order and functional programming
* SQL to explore the relational model
and a lot of small languages like
* AWK for all sorts of text processing and consolidation work
* Unix shell scripting
etc.
Python powers the most popular search engines and yet schoolchildren find easier to learn than VB.
VB 2005 is a complete OOP language but much more difficult to learn. I use VB for prototyping purposes and proceed with the development in VB 2005 to finally convert it into C# (with Option Explicit On).
1.How would you comment on the scenario: CSE students doing their final year project in VB?
2. Anything to add: http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/archives/000648.html
Some school children find Python easy to learn and some prefer VB. I don’t understand the first point you make.
As for (1), many CSE students DO their final year project using VB.
And for (2), I started with GW-Basic, moved to Pascal, loved C, tried C++, learned Java and now prefer Ruby and declarative languages (i.e. Lisp, Scheme, Haskell, …). Here also I fail to understand your point.