I'm a high school teacher, and I'd love to hear from some people who know Visual Basic well. I teach an intro programming class each year, and I currently use Python. I occasionally get students who have had a previous class in Visual Basic at another school. These students tend to think they already "know programming", but after two or three weeks in Python they start to tell me they're learning all kinds of concepts they didn't know about, and they say they're enjoying programming in Python more than Visual Basic. There are lots of variables in their experience though, so it's hard to tell exactly what is making programming more interesting to them.
My questions:
- Do you have any thoughts about people being introduced to Visual Basic as their first programming language?
- If one group of students are taught Visual Basic well, and another group is taught Python well, will all students come away with a decent grounding in programming?
I don't ask that as a language flame war, I'm honestly curious about how programming in the VB environment compares to languages I'm more familiar with such as Python, Java, C etc, especially for students who have no previous background in programming.
My questions:
- Do you have any thoughts about people being introduced to Visual Basic as their first programming language?
- If one group of students are taught Visual Basic well, and another group is taught Python well, will all students come away with a decent grounding in programming?
I don't ask that as a language flame war, I'm honestly curious about how programming in the VB environment compares to languages I'm more familiar with such as Python, Java, C etc, especially for students who have no previous background in programming.