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Comment by smoyer | Hacker News Reader

Is Visual Basic really any worse than what you'd be exposed to at a Drupal conference? I think you'd be hard-pressed to explain why you chose anything beyond a 4th generation scripting language if you were starting a new class with an unlimited budget.

Schools are often behind with this sort of technology, so depending on the development environment available, isn't one language as good as the next to explain concepts like assignment, boolean operations and program flow? (My high school computer classes were BASIC on a Burroughs B3300 mainframe and my first COMP SCI class at college was Fortran on an IBM s360 mainframe, so maybe I haven't got a clue!)

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I don't disagree with you, strictly speaking, but I do understand how VB might not be the best way to get people interested in programming. While JavaScript is, in my very humble opinion, a rather poor "first language", I understand why so many people seem to want to use it as such, because it is easy to get "neat" results.

When I was a youngster, I thought the copy of VB 5 my dad got me was the coolest thing ever, because being able to create "real" computer programs like the ones I used every day was super-awesome-sweet. Today, kids are much more likely to interact with mobile apps and web sites. So teaching them to make those things is more likely to be exciting, the way Windows GUI apps were for me in the 90s.

Not only is it easier to get neat results in JS but it has a very low barrier to entry. Everyone uses the internet and is just a shortcut away from executing javascript code in console of their favorite browser on a live page. That and the language itself is very "loose" when it comes to rules and strictness. It just gets the work done. Nothing like cpp for example. Now it can be both good thing because the results are easy and instantaneous and a bad thing because this gives a false notion to newcomers of how programing is done (but then again js is pretty ubiquitous on any modern computer, so it is as "real world" as it gets.)

I'm a IT/Computing teacher in the UK. We've only just started to teach Computer Science recently and although I was a developer before retraining as a teacher I chose Visual Basic.

Why? Well, we don't have to pay to install it, our technicians are happy to install it, the GUI design stuff is easy for students to use, I think it is easy to learn quickly and most importantly it allows our students to get high marks easily. Also I'm the only person in my school who can program - others will have to pick it up as the number of classes increases - again VB is easy for a novice to learn.

The exam board dictates what programing assessment is to be done and the amount of time it is to be done in. As much as I'd be happy to teach another language VB is the best fit in this case.

This is exactly the scenario I was guessing led to the choice of VB. I'm also going to agree with many of the comments saying Javascript might not be a great first language for new CS students.

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