Comment by buckbova | Hacker News Reader

Comment by buckbova | Hacker News Reader

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Don't teach your kids VB. It's a dead end language. I don't think anyone should learn VB anymore and I doubt anyone is taught "well". There are classes in VB and modules. You can write functions and procedures. But something like python will serve you better into the future.

I took every computer course available to me through high school and graduating in the 90's that didn't give me much choice. The teachers were not that knowledgeable so I ended up doing Apple BASIC and QBASIC lessons out of books. Honestly didn't learn much.

I took a introduction to programming course in college which was in C. Most of the time I was fighting syntax errors to perform the most basic operations. I didn't learn much.

I eventually switched my major to computer science and took another 101 course, this time taught with C++. Still I fought segfaults and syntax but I actually learned the basics.

No moral to this story, just I wish I had python as a choice when I was learning.

From my experience VBAs used a lot in the corporate world. Learning VB in high school can be of great use in the future if you're not looking for a tech career. Front-end MS Access, Excel Macros, screen-scraping, vb script to call SQL queries can all give you a leg up in a non programming career path.

I have an older relative who is still cashing in nicely on his VBA skills. There was a "demand vs pay" graph for tech skills going around awhile. VBA is low demand, but among the highest paid of the technologies.

From a cost perspective it's easy to see this. I've made plenty of trivial VB scripts in large/bureaucratic companies to automate tasks that a customer service person(or a whole department) had been doing for an hour a day for the last decade.

Yeah, the weird thing is how large and critical these VBA applications are that he works on. Lots of local banks and small businesses have, essentially, their entire business wrapped up in an old VBA CRUD app. Not that there's anything wrong with continuing to use the old technology, but all we hear about is the latest and coolest.

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