11-year old mediocre programmer

[berry120]

Looking back to the original post - you can get into bad habits in any language. Visual Basic just makes it incredibly easy to get into those habits, other languages like Java discourage this far more.

What are these bad habits? Well it varies, but code duplication, case insensitive and the general "let's hack it until it works" approach are on the top list. Why is this such a bad thing if it works? One word - maintainability. In the real world the vast majority of a system's life cycle is spent in maintenance and upgrading it, not in writing it. This job is made incredibly difficult if the code is written poorly to start with - hence the need to get into good programming habits from day 1! Trust me, when you're presented with huge amounts of poorly written code in the real world you'll see what I mean

 

[GibsonSGKing]

Looking back to the original post - you can get into bad habits in any language. Visual Basic just makes it incredibly easy to get into those habits, other languages like Java discourage this far more.

What are these bad habits? Well it varies, but code duplication, case insensitive and the general "let's hack it until it works" approach are on the top list. Why is this such a bad thing if it works? One word - maintainability. In the real world the vast majority of a system's life cycle is spent in maintenance and upgrading it, not in writing it. This job is made incredibly difficult if the code is written poorly to start with - hence the need to get into good programming habits from day 1! Trust me, when you're presented with huge amounts of poorly written code in the real world you'll see what I mean

Not to mention debugging becomes nearly impossible when writing the program for the first time....

 

[FORDSVTPARTS]

I Am 13 And Visual Basic Is Cool... I Have Been Programming For about 3 Years or so...

I Have Also Found this Website Called SIGOPS Pretty cool I created my own OS with it...
SIGOPSCreate Your Own Operating System Adventure

 

[berry120]

I Am 13 And Visual Basic Is Cool... I Have Been Programming For about 3 Years or so...

Sorry, but in the grand scheme of things that's nothing at all. Get a few years experience in a variety of languages, then come back to visual basic and tell me it's cool

 

[GibsonSGKing]

Sorry, but in the grand scheme of things that's nothing at all. Get a few years experience in a variety of languages, then come back to visual basic and tell me it's cool

Yeah.... I really can't wait to get into college and try my hand at Java to be quite honest

 

[wmorri]

~Darkseeker~, the Linux Kernel is written in C with small sections written in assembly language. For more on that see the Wikipedia article.

 

[hamalnamal]

IMO, stay away from visual basic. HORRIBLE LANGUAGE. Anyways if you want to do OS programming learn C and Assembly. If you want to do higher level tasks Java is good, but a really heavy language (I run Arch, so to me heavy == the devil). I suggest trying out a few to see what you like. You could also try interpreted languages and weakly typed (eg Python which is both and MAGIC to code in). If you are interested in developing good habits because you should "always code as if the person who ends up maintaining your code is a violent psychopath who knows where you live", code in C, it forces good habits. People might hate on the low level nature of C, but its a good starting point if you want to continue into C++.

PS MY GOD this thread makes me feel old

 

[berry120]

code in C, it forces good habits.

I wouldn't necessarily agree. C lets you do pretty much anything you want, whether it's a good habit, something that will generate a bug or something that will definitely crash as soon as you run your code.

There's another argument for staying away from C these days and that is it doesn't teach any of the higher level programming constructs that you WILL need to use if you go into this field. Object orientation is out, as are generics, closures, annotations, enums, etc. All of these things are in more modern, higher level languages but missing from C, and all of these things are things you'll need to understand.

 

[hamalnamal]

I wouldn't necessarily agree. C lets you do pretty much anything you want, whether it's a good habit, something that will generate a bug or something that will definitely crash as soon as you run your code.

True, but that's why I think C forces good habits. Other languages baby you, but in C you have to be conscious of good practices, otherwise not even you will be able to make heads or tails of your code and why it's not working as it should.

I don't think C is something to code in for years before you progress to another language, but it helps you understand the underlying structure behind the things it doesn't have (as you have to make it yourself if you want it).

 

[Johnwalton]

It's made in a primarily graphic interface, and is very basic. You would be /much/ better off learning C++, as it gives you a better idea of how other languages work in my opinion