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Comment by chrisacky | Hacker News Reader

Easily Visual Basic for me.

My first exposure academically to a programming language was Visual Basic. This was what they "force-taught" at school.

I already had experience with Java/PHP/C, and just wreethed inside with disgust at the rationale for learning Visual Basic. It was a horrible experience that was forced upon me by my school's teacher. (I was about 16-17 at the time I think).

As a form of silent defiance, whenever I had to declare a variable, I would call it `dim $%something%`. Ha.

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Had a similar experience when learning languages at the school I went too. There tehy started out with Perl (ya I dont' know why either), then VB6, and then ended with Java. It's probably the only time I've ever looked at Perl or java so fondly, and the VB6 experience was so bad it tainted my opinion of the .NET platform for years afterwards.

my first academically forced language was Java and now I hate java the most. I wonder if more people hate the first language they got taught.

My first academic (and non academic in fact) language are C... and I still find it nice ! And for the short exposure of Java, I find it distastefull with lot of cruft. Especially since I've met Common Lisp and Haskell...

When I was in college everyone hated C but I loved it.. but when Java came across, all those hated C loved Java but I never liked it.

My first language (after basic) was 68000 assembler (unless you count digital logic), followed by C and C++. When I went to college, they were imposing Object Pascal, which seemed a clunky and pointless language overall. It's possible that the language wasn't as bad as I made it out to be, but first impressions tend to be lasting impressions.

I imagine it varies considerably based on the teacher and other circumstances.

You may be on to something there. I despise BASIC and would never use it as an introductory language to someone learning how to program.

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