quote:
Originally posted by .Norma
you should start from one of these as Visual Basics will teach you all the wrong ways of doing things.
That is sooooo untrue (and such a typical thing to say)!!! VB does NOT teach you the wrong ways in doing things AT ALL.
Stuff done in VB is exactly the same done in any language. It is not like in VB "True" suddenly means "False" and 5+5 suddenly equals 11 and what not...
"VB teaches all the wrong things compared to C++" is exactly the same as saying
"C++ teaches all the wrong things compared to assembler"...
The thing is that VB is very easy to learn and that many people THINK they can program if they can make their name appear on a form in VB, so to speak. But in fact they don't have the analytical way of thinking required to make decent programs. It isn't the language that is "teaching" bad stuff, it is the people themselfs.
The advantages of VB is that you don't need to know (at first) the underlying stuff of what is done (eg: you don't need to know that variables in VB are actually pointers to memory locations, heck you don't need to know what pointers are at all to begin in VB). This is exactly the same as in C++ where you don't need to know how things are written out in assembler to know how to make something in C++. But in ANY language an IF THEN ELSE structure has the exact same logic, also in VB. But only the syntax in how you write it down is different. To know what these conditional structures are and how they work and how and when to use them is what programming is all about, and that is learned the easiest in VB, and is certainly not learned in the wrong way.
VB is an excellent tool to learn how to program and how to learn to think like a program, as the basics and syntax is very easy to learn and you can start learning logical programming strait away without first needing to know how things work "under the hood".
And THAT is what programming is about; learning how to analyse stuff, learning to think in logical/arithmetics ways. Once you master that you can develop from there and you would have much less trouble switching to any language.
Of course, if you never learned such stuff (and thus only know the syntax of a language, but not what it does or the logic behind it), you're stuck with the language you started with and you would find it hard to switch to another....
Don't confuse "programming" as knowing the syntax of language with "programming" as knowing how to analytically think and solve problems in a logical way.
To put it very bluntly: If you learn programming in VB, you can take it simple step by simple step and build further and further; If you want to learn programmnig in C++, you first need to learn other stuff in one go and only than starting difficult step by difficult step, but also with a lot more steps in between. When you learn how to program using a language like VB, the learning curve is a lot smoother than if you learn how to program in C++ (which has a steep learning curve).
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