Wednesday, March 08, 2006

Opinion: VB is Not a Suitable Language for Beginners

There was an interesting discussion over at Slashdot about using Visual Basic as a starter language. I personally do not think that VB is a language suited to a beginner programmer and any serious beginner should start off in a language that forces structure upon them. I recommend Pascal, but then again, I am biased since it was the language I learned on. Languages like Visual Basic, C++, Perl, and Java are either too complicated, contain too many gotchas, or are unstructured to be effective as a teaching language. Things like the default for VB allowing for undeclared variables is something of a turn-off in my opinion.

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