Get Into Programming

[Shalmanese]

Originally posted by: Descartes

Originally posted by: Shalmanese
C and VB are NOT learning languages, they are working languages and sacrifice good principles for ease of use. Go for something that was designed from the ground up to be a clean, concise learning lanuage like pascal which has already been stated.

What in the world does C sacrifice for ease of use? What sacrificial qualities of VB are in discord with principles at the time VB was released.

1. Its too powerful for a beginner, its far too easy to shoot your foot off
2. Its too obsolete for most tasks. Learning malloc and pointers should not be the aim of programming
3. Its bugs tend to be subtle.
4. it allows you to do dodgy things like while (list = list->next)
5. It relies on the philosophy that everything is just a stream of bits which is not the best way to start of (imho).
6. Its far harder to generate elegant code in C than in more modern languages.

As I said, its a good language for a specific task but its not the first one I would tell someone to learn.

 

[DT4K]

Why do you want to program?
What do you want to do with it?

If you want to write low level stuff like device drivers or firmware, learn C.
If you want to write games or other performance intensive apps, you've got to go with C++.
If you want to quickly write some business/datbase client apps with nice simple GUI's, learn VB6.
If you want to learn good fundamental OO programming skills without spending money, go with Java.
If you want to learn good fundamental OO programming skills AND build fancy GUI's quickly, AND spend some money, learn VB.Net, or C#.
If you want to get a job maintaining ancient mainframe systems, learn COBOL.

 

[DT4K]

Originally posted by: Regs
I would start with C++. It will get you into shape for most of the Microsoft's languages. I'm currently studying languages under VB.net like aspx and VB script.

aspx is not a language. It's a file extension.
And VB script no longer exists in the .net world.
ASP.Net apps are typically written in VB.Net or C#.

And if you are planning on using .Net, I don't see any reason to learn C++ first. Unless you enjoy the pain of dealing with explicit pointers and garbage collection.