Visual Basic Programmers are what some people call not real programmers. This is probably because Visual Basic, a userfriendly programming language created by microsoft, is easy to learn and use. Some programmers use Visual Basic (VB) because they can create Microsoft Windows programs in a second. Others use it because, honestly, it is not too bad of a starting language. It is also notorious for its use by young, inexperienced, wannabe, AOLers who impress their friends by using Source Code downloaded for free from the Internet, changing only the credits to reflect their names.

BASIC and BASIC-related programming languages are flexibly structured. This is great for people who wish to write simple programs to perform simple tasks. Conversely, it causes problems later on - Visual Basic programmers are notorious for writing badly structured code, should they ever go on to a more "real" language. So, although Visual Basic is a common beginners' programming language, it's not necessarily a good one.

Like many others I began my programming in BASIC.  The line numbered kind, that forever burned into my brain a tendency towards disorganized code.  I enjoyed it a lot and wrote many a program just for the fun of it.  Of course they weren't very advanced and the fact that AtariBASIC stunk at string handling (you couldn't even create an array of type string) didn't help at all.  Still, I remember we (a close friend and I) did an interface for OS functions, a silly frankenstein of a game and even a management program and crude database for a local video club (this program was a time bomb doomed to collapse on its own weight. Lucky for us, Atari's crappy drive gave up before the program did).  We were about 12 or 14 at the time.

Moving on to more advanced languages, we took a course in Pascal.  The change from BASIC to a rigidly structured language almost tied a knot on my brain but once I got over it, I never returned to BASIC.  I dabbled somewhat in C in college, for a course called "Numeric Analysis" (loosely translated) but never really did anything with it outside class assignments.  To this day I haven't written a single line of object oriented code.

Most of my programming today is done in Perl and shell scripts (light sysadmin duties only, I mostly do networking and telecommunications).  Being a Pascal fan, the logical language of choice for me would be any variant of it (such as Delphi), but for some reason I never gave it a try.

Now, back on topic, VisualBasic returned the fun in programming for me.  I can now write quick and dirty silly programs with source code that is easy to understand even for the relative layman.  Of course, most of my projects will never be released, but what the hell,  I'm enjoying it.  Getting there is more than half the fun in my case.

Yes, I realize that VisualBasic is also used to develop serious applications.  This writeup refers to a very personal view of the language.

To say that someone Visual Basic isn't a real programmer is a poor generalization to make. Visual Basic is, of course, what one would consider an "easy" language, compared to the evil C++ and whatnot, but that alone shouldn't discount it.

For example, one could be a poor C++ programmer, or one could be an extremely expierenced Visual Basic programmer - and just because one is programming a more "difficult" language doesn't mean he/she is neccisarialy better than the other.

Also, Visual Basic is still a powerful language, and has many pratical applications, and can still be quite complex. Then again, if you think about it, who cares if one is a "real programmer", other than as an ego boost?!

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