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State of the FE devs?
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screaming:
back in the day, something coded in VB was much slower than an equally-functioning program compiled in straight C.  It's the computers that have gotten faster and cheaper that have taken that out of thew equation.

someone who's codes professionally in C/C++ will be able to code the same thing just as fast as someone who codes in VB professionally.  This is for a couple reasons which are more auxiliary properties of the language than the language itself:

1) anyone who codes professionally in C/C++ will have libraries and blocks of code at thier disposal that are tailored to thier programming style.  Using these will reduce the humdrum rampup time considerably.  VB programmers do too, but to a lesser extent. See #2.

2) Someone who codes VB professionally typically hasn't been doing so for very long, especially compared with the professional C coders.  It's a lot harder to code fluent C than it is VB, and has a longer/steeper learning curve.  This takes long term dedication - something typical VB'ers don't have.

The stated advantage to VB is true - you have a smaller development window and its easier to learn - which are the same reasons why one might go with .NET.  In the near future (now?) the speed difference has become negligible on affordable hardware between a JIT compiled language and a lower level hard compiled program, like C.

VB is generally harder to maintain though because of all the hoops you have to jump through to do anything complicated. The more crap you have to code around, the more intricate and less elegant your code becomes.  How many times ahve you VB'ers coded something and then change something else a year later and spend a week staright trying to figure out why it doesn't work (or broke somethign else) only to find it's because you had to code around some inefficiency in your language?

The .NET languages fix this sort of thing since you kind of get the best of both worlds... with an added resource requirement though :/

AllisterFiend:
I would like to start learning a programming language.  I was thinking about learning VB6 but I have noticed people around mentioning .NET.  Are VB6 and .NET the same? and if not, what is the difference between the two? and if there is a difference, which one would be best to tackle first?

Allister Fiend


P.S.  can anyone recommend a beginner book for VB6 or .NET that a newcomer to programming can understand?

(I have not programmed anything since the Commodore 64, and that was in basic  :-[ )


edit: okay, I've noticed there is a difference, something about helping different programs work seamlessly or something like that.  I still would like to know if I should start learning with .NET or VB6? also, is there any reason that some of the programmers who are working with VB6 have not started working with .net as of yet?
loadman:

--- Quote ---edit: okay, I've noticed there is a difference, something about helping different programs work seamlessly or something like that.  I still would like to know if I should start learning with .NET or VB6? also, is there any reason that some of the programmers who are working with VB6 have not started working with .net as of yet?
--- End quote ---

My understanding is .net is the future but is more resource hungry. Not really needed for a FE I guess as you want to cater to older machines that are commonly used in CABS.
screaming:

--- Quote from: loadman on September 08, 2006, 09:24:14 pm ---
--- Quote ---edit: okay, I've noticed there is a difference, something about helping different programs work seamlessly or something like that.  I still would like to know if I should start learning with .NET or VB6? also, is there any reason that some of the programmers who are working with VB6 have not started working with .net as of yet?
--- End quote ---

My understanding is .net is the future but is more resource hungry. Not really needed for a FE I guess as you want to cater to older machines that are commonly used in CABS.

--- End quote ---

  Exactly!  VB6 has been around a looooong time so you can find a ton of stuff out there on the innernits to help you out.

  .NET is actually just the name for Microsoft's Just In Time compiler. The Just In Time compiler knows about the languages VB.NET and C#.  Just to clarify some terminology - you don't "learn .NET". You learn VB.NET, C#, Java.NET, and/or ASP.NET.  They're all different languages.

  The one critical difference between any .NET language and VB6 is that .NET is "object oriented" and you have to learn about objects and classes with methods and properties.  There are a lot of foreign terms here for the newb so it's a little heavy on the brain when you're just figureing it all out, but the payoff is that object orientated languages are not going away. It's cleaner, easier to maintain and share than non OO languages, and makes switching to a more "serious" language, like C++ SO much easier.

  Another big difference is the ease of integrating other technologies to make a more dynamic program. Connecting your program to the internet is a breeze in .NET, for example, because the .NET JIT compiler (i.e. the ".NET" package that your end users will download) comes with all the libraries to do pretty much anything you want.  VB6 is older - you need 3rd party stuff (if you've ever used MAMEWAH, you know that extra setup batch file Minwah has? Yeah, that's third party stuff).

VB6 on the other hand has it's benefits - it's easy. No new language terminology to learn once you know what a function (err Sub) is. Despite the popularity of VB6 here, it is on its way out because it's so old.  It's being replaced with ".NET".  There is an advantage of VB6 though - if you're rusty and are looking to get back into it, MS has some rudimentary (i mean rudementary)converters to convert VB6 to VB.NET.  You can start off with VB6 and "upgrade" your program later if you feel like you want to switch.
screaming:
The other thing is that the C# compiler is free.  I think you have to pay for the VB6 compiler, assuming you can find it.
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