I’ve heard that Visual Basic is easier to learn if you work with Cobol. That’s a planet off the Battlestar Galactica show. It’s also a programming language. Does that make learning Visual Basic moot? VB isn’t moot. VB.NET is the Visual Basic language on a .net infrastructure. Which programming language should I learn? I need to make a selection for my course schedule. Visual Basic is easier to learn, because its syntax is simpler. That’s a strong plus. Unfortunately, Java is used almost everywhere. So if you plan on doing coding in the real world, you need to know Java. I’ve heard jokes that VB.net is a joke in and of itself. That’s because VB.NET is evolving to be closer to C than anything else. Would it be hard to learn C if I learn Java? Java and C are closer to each other, so learning Java won’t make it harder to learn C. And then there are people who would learn Java just to avoid being stuck on the Windows platform. Objective C is even used in iPhone development. It is only used on iPhone development. If VB is hardly ever used, why do they teach it? Have you ever heard of tenure? There are schools teaching VB because there are still professors who learned Basic and now teach VB to stay relevant. That’s like learning Latin. There are still schools teaching Latin. But unless you are a priest, no one has to know Latin. Learning the programming equivalent is a dead end for my career before it even starts. I was going to say that was Lisp, because VB.net is still used by Microsoft, so you could find a job in that. Java looks better on my resume. It won’t hurt me with MS gurus, but it will look bad to a lot of other developers if that’s all I can list on my resume.
