A good friend of mine loves preaching to me that VB is the best language out there. I have just begun my programming career, so I'm not experienced enough to argue with him on the subject. All I have done so far is learned some C in a few of my college classes. What do you all think about VB? If you hate it, give me some arguments to throw at him so I can be ready next time he brings it up.
Name:
Anonymous2010-04-24 13:43
It is practically impossible to teach good programming to students that have had a prior exposure to BASIC: as potential programmers they are mentally mutilated beyond hope of regeneration.
*Edsger W. Dijkstra, "How do we tell truths that might hurt?" (1975). Published in ACM SIGPLAN Notices 17:5 (May 1982), pp. 13–15.
The teaching of BASIC should be rated as a criminal offence: it mutilates the mind beyond recovery.
* Edsger W. Dijkstra, "The Threats to Computing Science", ACM 1984 South Central Regional Conference, November 16–18, Austin, Texas.
Basic happened to be on a GE timesharing system that was done by Dartmouth, and when GE decided to franchise that, it started spreading Basic around just because it was there, not because it had any intrinsic merits whatsoever.
* Alan Kay, quoted in Stuart Feldman, A Conversation with Alan Kay, ACM Queue 2:9 (Dec/Jan 2004-2005)
Tell your friend that he will never be a good programmer and then finish learning C