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thuh Freak
Finally broke the seal
 
Join Date: May 2004
 
2005-03-01, 11:08

VB is an interesting language. It is (or atleast was) similar to REALbasic (haven't looked at RB in a long long time). But VB isn't really used very much anymore (atleast not at my job; and from my understanding not much in business). We don't even have a version of VStudio to deal with VB6- anymore; our classic-VB apps are old and time-tested and dont need active development. VB.net, the successor to VB, is a very different language (while maintaining some, perhaps most, of the VB syntax). It breaks compatibility a lot, and theres a whole lot of new concepts introduced to the language (like OO). One thing to note is that VBA is still very close to classic VB. I think I read in VS mag that VBA is going .net (or maybe it already has).

The .net languages are pretty cool. I mean, about as cool as languages can get when they don't allow you to do pointer arithmetic. I certainly wouldn't recommend going with them over anything Cocoa related, but you should be aware that the mono project made a .net compiler (i think c#.net, maybe it was vb.net; maybe both?) that works on non-windows machines, and theres a large enough f/oss .net libraries available to mimic much of the standard .net ones. one side benefit of c#.net is that it is so fucking close to java; well, that may or may not be seen as a benefit. another nifty thing about .net is that any .net language u write in (for windows, theres more than just the standard c# and vb.net) will compile to a bytecode (same idea as java, different implementation).

If you are really interested in programming, I think you should learn memory management, thence a language like c, c++ or objective-c. it is a very important part of CS. objc kind of cheats a little, wrt memory management, but theres some there. If you are just curious about programming, a higher level language like java would probably better suite you.

WRT sql, yes, they all are basically the same. you have SELECTs, INSERTs, UPDATEs, DELETEs and so on. Sometimes one has a peculiar feature that another one doesn't (like with joins, i think one db had INNER and OUTER joins before the competitors...).
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