I usually just read the AO forums and tend not to post as I am not into security but I have an opinion on VB that I would like to share and see what some others think about it. There are a number of "What language to learn threads out there" and some great answers to these posts. The majority of answers advise people to learn C/C++, Java or ASM, very few say VB is a good language to learn, I propose that it is and here is why (I will try to be brief and elaborate only when necessary)...Flame away VB haters!!!
1. VB is very easy to learn, several months of working with it on a somewhat serious level results in an individual that can bang out a somewhat usefull application. It may take that long for someone to just grasp the basics of the some of the OO languages.
2. Microsoft Office, the majority of organizations that have windows based infrastructures also use some if not all of the components of the Microsoft Office suite. VB is the macro language for Office and with it you can fully customize virtually anything within Office if you can think of it you can do it in office with vb. I would love to elaborate on some of the things I have done for the organization I work for with VB/VBA but it is somewhat beyond the scope of my discussion but I will give one example that helped propel my career. While in college I started learning VB as a hobby and while working as an agent at a large call center I observed all the level 1 managers preforming repetitive tasks. Mainly manually tallying agent productivity from individual spreadsheets. I asked my manger how long he spent each day doing productivity, at least an hour he told me. To make a long story short I hacked together an improved agent spreadsheet that saved there daily productivity based on ther network login name and the current date. I then hacked together an administrative sheet that simply opened each sheet cut and pasted the relevent numbers and gave a tally for the group. After deploying the solution in my group I was asked to design something that out whole project could use and was pulled from doing agent tasks, phone duty mainly and given a level 1 managers pay and worked full time writing macros for all our managers, client reps, and project directors. These were lazy execs that wanted everything done for them, I can't tell you how many spreadsheets I made with just buttons on them to open our daily reports. Upon finishing my education I was offered a full time position in the IS department where I help facilitate organization-wide information sharing. All because I had worked with VB for 4 months prior to working at the call center and hacked together 2 simple spreadsheets with about 100 lines of code. In summary if you know VB you can really shine when if comes to working with the MS Office Suite, this applies to all levels of an organization, from the secretary all the way to the top.
3. While syntax varies greatly from language to language there are some concepts that are the same regardless of language and an easy language like VB introduces programmers to these concepts in a much easier way than the OO languages. Some may beg to differ but hey it's my opinion. Once comfortable with VB the transition to the OO's and applying the basic concepts is much easier.
any thoughts or feedback on this??, as I said this is just my opinion but I believe the above to be valid points for the defense of VB as a programming language.
