GCSEs
26th August, 2006A couple of days ago I got my GCSE results. I was going to post them sooner but I was held off by the fact that the majority of the past 2 days have been a blur 
. I’ve got an A* in Maths; As in Chemistry, Physics and IT; Bs in English, Geography and Biology; Cs in French and Spanish, and a D in RS. I’m very pleased with them considering that the lower the grade the less important I felt the subject in question was. It’s also very good results for the A level courses I’m planning on taking: maths, physics, electronics and computing, and I’m really looking forward to it.
The only thing I’m not particularly looking forward to is Computing. In the other colleges they give you a choice on what you want to do programming wise, but in the one I’m going to they force you to study Visual BASIC and nothing else. Not good considering I’m a linux boy. Can anyone with experience in these matters tell me how knowing Visual BASIC will benifit me (i.e. what languages it is alike to… etc)? This also means I will have to install windows again and download Visual BASIC for there. *sigh*, don’t you just love proprietary standards.
Unless it’s changed a lot since VB6, it’s very much like… well, BASIC. It’s pretty verbose and feels really “clunky” but the silver lining is that it’s a piece of piss to learn.
It’s the third most popular language according to http://www.tiobe.com/tpci.htm so it’s probably worth knowing. I haven’t used it since college, myself, but when I was hunting for jobs recently VB experience seemed to be quite a common requirement.
Don’t worry about the particular language being taught: the grammar of many programming languages are fairly similar and once you’ve got the general idea, it can be applied to most of them; this applies to scripting languages too. C, Perl, VBasic, Python, Java, whatever… So long as you learn good programming practices, that’ll be fine
If its VB.Net, there is now a VB compiler for Mono
I’m planning on taking a course on programming soon, and I’m worried about encountering the same problem. Right now, I hardly know a thing about programming, but I really don’t want to end up knowing junk about the proprietary stuff when I *highly* prefer more free alternatives. I might even make a point in class about it by refusing to use anything propriety…