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Originally Posted by Kilo
Yes that would be a reason to teach 'Visual Basic', but not school. Teaching languages in school is for knowledge of languages used in everyday programming jobs. Teaching a friend visual basic, i would have to agree with you. But as far as teaching them it, to send them out into the real world thinking they know something in my OPINION is messed up.
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i know you said 'not .NET', but my only VB experience is VB.NET. That said, I feel having basic (pun intended) knowledge is certainly worthwhile.
As a prototyping tool, VB is one of the languages of choice, if not the language. It's just so damn easy and quick to slap something together that would otherwise take a good deal longer. When you sit down with a client, and start whipping up UIs for them, and adding a bit of code to connect to their database so they can see what's happening, they want to see results right away. Having these skills lets you give them that.
Then there's also the fact that many (mainly trivial) applications are not processor intensive. When your program spends 99.99% of its time waiting for the user to press a key or move the mouse, performance really isn't an issue. Size still is, but all the .NET languages compile down fairly small, thanks to the .NET framework.
I agree wholeheartedly that many larger real-world applications cannot be written in VB and expected to meet performance requirements. I also agree that VB allows for lazy coding practices, what with the autoformatting and 'intellisense' thing going on. Still, I believe it's a language that definitely has its place in the industry, and as a teaching tool, what
Mjordan2nd said is hard to overstress. Seeing immediate or short-term success is a strong motivating factor in learning (or any endeavor, for that matter). Why do you think one of the major factors of project success is having small milestones/early deliverables? It keeps the team motivated.