Re: My First Computer (was Computing Editorial)

["Rolenta" <rolenta.press@verizon.net>]

Just a quick note on the state of BASIC today. I taught myself programming
20 years ago by learning Atari BASIC on my Atari 800. I then went to school
and learned Assembler and COBOL and spent the next ten years as a mainframe
COBOL developor, eventually leaving the field in 1995 to become a technical
writer.

Last year I taught myself Visual Basic 6 and fell in love with it. This year
I went the next step and am now taking a course on .Net developing. VB.Net
is a world away from VB 6! VB is now an official Object Oriented Language
and its structure is very similar to C#. In fact, if you write the same
program in C# and VB.net, both will be compiled into identical code.

I'm sure once I've been programming in VB.net for a while I will love it.
Meanwhile, it's very difficult to grasp in the beginning!

Leonard Herman


"Simon Williams" <*email*@*luddite.ca*> wrote in message
251548.LRLKKTYL@news.telusplanet.net">news:251548.LRLKKTYL@news.telusplanet.net...
>
>
> On Wed, 5 Feb 2003 19:35:02 +0000 (UTC) pausch@saaf.se (Paul Schlyter)
wrote:
>
>
> > :-) ...the late E. Dijkstra would have hated this!  Yes, he's the man
> > who once said: "The teaching of BASIC, in schools, should be
> > considered a criminal act!"
>
> I think the whole anti-BASIC thing is just plain silly. It's very easy
> to learn and, if it doesn't teach 'proper' programming, at least it
> excercises the brain.
> In my experience I've found that BASIC is a lot easier to learn than
> 'better' languages and is very well suited to those of us who are mere
> tinkerers.
>
> --
> Simon Williams
> Luddite Enterprises
> http://www.luddite.ca