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.