Stephanie Giovannini (3/29/2012)
sturner (3/28/2012)
In my experience VB/Basic programmers have shown the worst software design techniques, implementations and documentation. The opposite seems to be true for those trained in OO, and specifically C & C++.I have seen this over and over again through the years. More often than not, VB programmers were self-taught or migrated to VB from vbscript (or VBA like with excell). Very few people have the discipline or aptitude to self teach C++... and some don;t get it even after getting exposed to it in college course.
My $.02
Yes, I've seen this also. It's not being self-taught. A large percentage of the programmers I know are self-taught (myself included). But, those for whom the first language was VB or VBA have this disadvantage. I'm not sure why. I think it's bad habit. VB code, in the past, didn't enforce good coding habits and some of the language limitations prevented good coding. Now, there's so much bad VB code out there, it's like a self-perpetuating cycle.
Personally, I loath VB, and I've tried to rationalize that loathing. I associate it with the worst programming I've ever seen. I also have a strong distaste for its verbosity, awkward keyword casing, and the childish names Me and My.
You haven't seen the COBOL code I had the opportunity to support for eleven years. The base code, we could do nothing about, and we had to code in it to its level (UGLY!). New code that we could separate out to new supprograms, that is where we used structured coding, eliminated the use of GOTOs, etc. That code was clean and easily maintained and enhanced.