Visual Basic! - First Language Stories

the_Grinch

Had some projects at work that require a GUI and I thought I'd take a look at Visual Basic (we're completely Windows based). I originally learned Visual Basic in my freshmen year of high school some 17 years ago. Part of my amazement came from remembering some of the things I learned all those years ago (such as naming a label as lbl<name>). But they have definitely made some amazing changes to it.

What's the first language you learned? Could you see yourself using it again?

alias454

It depends on how you classify things but BASH was my first scripting language. After that, I got pretty heavy into web development back in the day so I taught myself PHP, then I learned SQL, JavaScript, and PERL(very little perl). One can make an argument that those don't count since they are not compiled languages. I had a go round with VB 5 also back in the day. More recently, I built a project in C# and trying to learn some basic Python. Oh and sprinkle some VB script and PowerShell in there.

stryder144

My first language was BASIC, senior year of high school. I picked it up pretty quickly, which led to a bit of arrogance. I would either write the code out or program the system, never both after the first month. My poor, long suffering teacher had to put up with my insistence that I wasn't wrong. After proving myself a few times she relented and wouldn't ask me to do both. Now that I am older, I can see how stupid and arrogant I was.

wastedtime

Like stryder144 BASIC/QBASIC was my first language. I do not see my self using it at all in the future. The first language that I did something useful for someone other then myself was about 10 years ago in AutoIt V3. I never received any formal training for any language I wrote in though till a couple of years ago where I got a week of kick start training in Python. Doing malware analysis I have needed to program or read programs/scripts in a number of languages. If the language is currently being programmed in I have probably read or written in it. Currently I am writing a lot of stuff in Java, Python, GAWK, PowerShell, and C.

Verities

BASH was the first language I became proficient in and I still use it occasionally when the need arises to automate mundane tasks. Learning BASH helped me understand basic programming principles, which allows me to read a Python or PERL script and understand enough to know what its doing. I've been off and on the Python bandwagon for years....I would eventually like to become fully proficient with it or with PERL. Either way knowing multiple languages will only benefit me.

paul78

The first language that I had exposure was Applesoft Basic. A great little language - just a bit more complex than Logo which also was my first exposure to a programming language. I only wrote simple snippets with those languages. The language that I learned basic programming was Pascal. But my first real programs were written in Vax11/780 Assembly and Fortran.

Obviously, none of these languages are commonly used commercially these days. Generally speaking, I prefer to focus on knowing just one or two languages - I prefer imperative vs functional languages for my work.

p@r0tuXus

First I had experience with was BASIC when my H.S. comp teacher still had some tandy computers around for intro computer classes. Yeah, he had pentium II's too, but foundations are important. I eventually got to keep one of them when he phased them out entirely and had a "programming with basic" book along with it. Every bit as 80's as I was the year I was born. I learned how to make the computer flash colors, screech with tones and compute simple calculations before I moved on to HTML and building websites which took up most of my time. Taught myself HTML via search-engine digging and source-code scrapping.

Slowhand

I was a little late to the game. I started with Visual Basic 6 (2000), then went into HTML4/CSS2 and JavaScript (2001) for a while, then finally picked up C/C++ (2003) and a little bit of C# (2006). Since then, my primary coding/scripting language has been PowerShell, starting in 2011, and I haven't looked back. Eventually, I'll go back and take some more classes, perhaps pursue some more compsci education so I can make the move to DevOps proper, but for now I'm a mad, scriptin' sysadmin with a hatred of doing things by hand.

Dzeko2014

I learned PHP and SQL at the same time in one of my beginner courses and I thought it was pretty cool but I havent touched PHP since.