PJ on Development: Blog

I am a subscriber of many newsletters... (sometimes I think it's too much for my own sake)

Today I was reading THIS post and it prompted me to write a somewhat lengthy reply.

I'm not sure if I got the right tone... But I'm posting the reply here just in case.

Hi...

Like most developers of my generation I had my first contact with computers with BASIC... Some 20 years ago.

When I started coding in BASIC the most powerful systems were developed using COBOL, Fortran, Algol, etc...

Anyway... Back then all you had to do to program in BASIC was pull up a chair, sit on your computer and (usually) start typing something like...

2 CLS
10 PRINT "Hello World!"
20 GOTO 10

Hehe... It was easy... :-P

As I grew older BASIC grew up with me... It overcame many obstacles in its way. It left the ugly spaghetti programming, to become a procedural language... when you need to type something like:

Sub Main()
   While (True)
      Print "Hello World!"
   Wend
End Sub

Then BASIC became an event-oriented programming (as of Visual Basic 1.0 for DOS -- I still have the Install :-) Where you'd need to type something like

Sub Button_Click()
   MsgBox "Hello World!"
End Sub

And for quite some time it was an event-oriented language. Regarded as a second level language for many C programmers that liked their curly brackets and their ugly syntax.

The difficulty to develop software was ever increasing as the time went by. Computers got twice as much power every six months. Moore's Law was obeyed more than Gravity's Law.

BASIC wasn't keeping up with the demands of this new era. Many saw the end of BASIC as certain as death and taxes...

But then in 2001 Microsoft presented us with VB.NET.

It was not the BASIC everyone knew... Yet, it was a familiar ground...
Something that we understood... We knew we could Master it.

The learning curve was not that steep -- but there was a learning curve. It took time. We had to learn how to do simple things once more... But it was good... It was fun...

And that's what everything is about... FUN!

Sure thing... A lot of us code for money... But there's a great deal of people who code because it's FUN! (and if we are paid for doing this, it is even better :-)

If you code for some time you know what I am talking about...

With VB.NET we had to learn about Classes, Interfaces, Polymorphism, Overloads, Shadows, Inheritance, etc, etc, etc...

So many new things were thrown so hard at us that many of us had a very hard time adjusting themselves. But we managed to learn everything we needed to know.

So... If you want to write that "Hello World" program now with VB.NET 2005, all you have to do is:

Module HelloWorld
   Sub Main()
      Do While (True)
         System.Console.WriteLine("Hello World!")
      Loop
   End Sub
End Module

Oh yeah! I forgot to mention... Now we can build console application again... :-)