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I first learned how to program in VB4. I can see why as a professional programmer it lost favor, but it was a great learning language.

eddieh 7y ago
I learned how to program in VB4 too. My parents had no idea why I wanted it or what it was for. I used to take the textbook sized manuals with me to read/study while camping and fishing.
frequentnapper 7y ago
I first learned it by myself in VB5. I didn't even understand functions, but writing those MessageBoxes with buttons and then having them create even more message boxes was so great! I remember a high school friend bringing me 5 diskettes with VB4 installer because I didn't have it on my home computer. Then next year I enrolled in AP Comp Sci - hardcore turbo c++. Just blew my mind!
- applecrazy 7y ago
  > Then next year I enrolled in AP Comp Sci - hardcore turbo c++. Funny enough, AP Comp Sci went the other direction in the early 2000s, switching from C++ to Java precisely because it was too hardcore for the average high school student.
  - notduncansmith 7y ago
    My high school in ~2010 had the progression C -> C++ -> Java. I remember the C++ that we were taught being easy enough to learn after a semester of C, and graduated before I could take Java.
  - frequentnapper 7y ago
    haha. I was so excited to learn about C-style strings in AP comp sci 2 I think. And bitshifting, and crazy recursions, queueing, etc. Good old days... I was so arrogant after that too. C is the best and everything else is garbage because it's "slow".
Koshkin 7y ago
> great learning language E.W.Dijkstra would disagree: "It is practically impossible to teach good programming to students that have had a prior exposure to BASIC: as potential programmers they are mentally mutilated beyond hope of regeneration."
- freehunter 7y ago
  Has there ever, in the history of learning, been a subject like that? A subject so damaging that it forever ruined anyone who learned it? Or maybe Dijkstra was wrong.
  - jl6 7y ago
    Probably just hyperbolic. Bad habits are a common complaint in music and sports education too. Not insurmountable, but not helpful, and it must be frustrating as a teacher to have to unteach bad habits.
  - kragen 7y ago
    Christian theology was historically a great impediment to learning about physics; some Christian cults continue to impede people from learning about biology. People who are really good at manipulating other people seem to have a hard time learning to do productive things, maybe because it's too easy to manipulate other people to do them instead, but maybe because people sometimes follow the Law of Attraction, where you make wishful thinking come true by believing in it hard enough, while software and Volkswagen engines do, if anything, the opposite. More broadly, I think any field of learning carries with it a sort of implicit value system: we consider things x and y centrally important, while things a and b are inconsequential details. Much of learning a field involves internalizing these values to the point where you apply them automatically without even being aware that there's an alternative. But often they are suboptimal or even counterproductive in a different field. Volkswagen engines don't care about paint color or whether your grandfather just died, but they do care about thousandth-of-an-inch tolerances and not making mistakes. Interior decorating doesn't care about thousandth-of-an-inch tolerances or clean abstractions, but it does care about paint color and whether your grandfather just died. Debugging software doesn't care about not making mistakes or paint color, but it does care about clean abstractions. This is even true in subfields within the same field: real-time engine control software cares about memory allocation in a way that seems completely insane to anyone who programs in Python, for example. BASIC tends to reward novice programmers for banging on a piece of code cluelessly until they get it to work in some cases. Dijkstra, by contrast, believed that what was important was having sufficient logical understanding of the program's space of possible behaviors that you could be sure it would work even before testing it; he in fact designed and successfully taught an introduction-to-computer-programming course that used no actual computers. It's unsurprising that someone who had internalized BASIC's value system would be extremely resistant to Dijkstra's preferred approach, and that Dijkstra's disciples would be extremely resistant to the BASIC approach, even though in fact they are complementary, and each one works best for some classes of problems, so those who are best at one of these ways of working are those who would gain the most from learning the other.

eddieh 7y ago

I learned how to program in VB4 too. My parents had no idea why I wanted it or what it was for. I used to take the textbook sized manuals with me to read/study while camping and fishing.

frequentnapper 7y ago

I first learned it by myself in VB5. I didn't even understand functions, but writing those MessageBoxes with buttons and then having them create even more message boxes was so great! I remember a high school friend bringing me 5 diskettes with VB4 installer because I didn't have it on my home computer. Then next year I enrolled in AP Comp Sci - hardcore turbo c++. Just blew my mind!

applecrazy 7y ago
> Then next year I enrolled in AP Comp Sci - hardcore turbo c++. Funny enough, AP Comp Sci went the other direction in the early 2000s, switching from C++ to Java precisely because it was too hardcore for the average high school student.
- notduncansmith 7y ago
  My high school in ~2010 had the progression C -> C++ -> Java. I remember the C++ that we were taught being easy enough to learn after a semester of C, and graduated before I could take Java.
- frequentnapper 7y ago
  haha. I was so excited to learn about C-style strings in AP comp sci 2 I think. And bitshifting, and crazy recursions, queueing, etc. Good old days... I was so arrogant after that too. C is the best and everything else is garbage because it's "slow".

Koshkin 7y ago

> great learning language E.W.Dijkstra would disagree: "It is practically impossible to teach good programming to students that have had a prior exposure to BASIC: as potential programmers they are mentally mutilated beyond hope of regeneration."

freehunter 7y ago
Has there ever, in the history of learning, been a subject like that? A subject so damaging that it forever ruined anyone who learned it? Or maybe Dijkstra was wrong.
- jl6 7y ago
  Probably just hyperbolic. Bad habits are a common complaint in music and sports education too. Not insurmountable, but not helpful, and it must be frustrating as a teacher to have to unteach bad habits.
- kragen 7y ago
  Christian theology was historically a great impediment to learning about physics; some Christian cults continue to impede people from learning about biology. People who are really good at manipulating other people seem to have a hard time learning to do productive things, maybe because it's too easy to manipulate other people to do them instead, but maybe because people sometimes follow the Law of Attraction, where you make wishful thinking come true by believing in it hard enough, while software and Volkswagen engines do, if anything, the opposite. More broadly, I think any field of learning carries with it a sort of implicit value system: we consider things x and y centrally important, while things a and b are inconsequential details. Much of learning a field involves internalizing these values to the point where you apply them automatically without even being aware that there's an alternative. But often they are suboptimal or even counterproductive in a different field. Volkswagen engines don't care about paint color or whether your grandfather just died, but they do care about thousandth-of-an-inch tolerances and not making mistakes. Interior decorating doesn't care about thousandth-of-an-inch tolerances or clean abstractions, but it does care about paint color and whether your grandfather just died. Debugging software doesn't care about not making mistakes or paint color, but it does care about clean abstractions. This is even true in subfields within the same field: real-time engine control software cares about memory allocation in a way that seems completely insane to anyone who programs in Python, for example. BASIC tends to reward novice programmers for banging on a piece of code cluelessly until they get it to work in some cases. Dijkstra, by contrast, believed that what was important was having sufficient logical understanding of the program's space of possible behaviors that you could be sure it would work even before testing it; he in fact designed and successfully taught an introduction-to-computer-programming course that used no actual computers. It's unsurprising that someone who had internalized BASIC's value system would be extremely resistant to Dijkstra's preferred approach, and that Dijkstra's disciples would be extremely resistant to the BASIC approach, even though in fact they are complementary, and each one works best for some classes of problems, so those who are best at one of these ways of working are those who would gain the most from learning the other.