Ei Maung’s Blog

First of all, I need to say that I’m neither a guru nor expert. I have no idea to consider and compare about programming languages. But I think I can give some advice to beginner.

Yesterday, my friend asked me that he wanted to start learning programming. He wanted to know which language he should learn first. He heard about some visual languages. Someone told him, those visual languages are very easy to learn and will give him great productivity. “Is that true?” He asked. How should I say?

In my opinion, if the beginner learns Visual Basic first, it can misunderstand about the programming. I don’t mean that Visual Basic is a bad language. Visual Basic is the language of choice to develop desktop application for me.

Visual Basic is a useful language. But beginner shouldn’t learn that language first. It can only be wasting their time by trying to understand textbox instead of trying to understand string processing. They will make double click on a command button to write a command1_click() procedure but they can’t clear understand about object, method and event. They think Visual Basic itself a programming language and they also can’t clearly understand what programming language is and what IDE is. They will blame other languages for not having great drag and drop IDE. And then they won’t try to understand memory management, threading, garbage collection and other important programming feature. They will think those features are not necessary to understand.

After having some experiences in developing applications, they can develop some windows-base small applications. But they will face some difficulties in learning other languages like Java, PHP. Because they can’t develop without drag and drop IDE. And they will blame those languages again.

In the real programming world, it is impossible to emphasize on only one language. We must know various languages. If beginner learn VB and love it, they will find that difficult to learn other language. If s/he learns a language like C or Java first, studying other language will be easy-going.

Believe it or not, I have never heard about regular expression within 2 years experiences as a professional because I’m a VB developer.