h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

I'm going to bring my entry to atention, see if I can get it put in and if there are tips on how to improve my entry Thanks

-- DoctorMO --

http://www.bbc.co.uk/h2g2/guide/A571754

This entry is not ready for peer review yet. Peer Review is really for articles that are more or less finished. This one is not. It needs a lot more structure put onto it, as it is very much a collection of sentences about Visual Basic at the moment.

You should probably try submitting it to the Writer's Workshop.

ditto.

OK

I don't think I'll try again, I made a mistake sorry.

-- DoctorMO --

I'm sorry you deleted your entry. It was not my intention to suggest that you should do this. I suggested that you should bring it to the Writer's Workshop. There are people there who will make plenty of suggestions on how to tidy it up and make it into a good entry. You can still get it back, even though it is deleted. It's not too late!

don't worry, I got it in MS Word Format on a disk and on my laptop, it's a good thing to keep backups, I duno I think I'll hang back for a while, and whatch others, I could have writen seams of explanations and code, I could have even done small sections each for a page, but I can see that H2G2 is not ready for VisualBasic so let us wait.

Thanks for the advice.

-- DoctorMO --

Have you seen my Entry on the programming language Haskell? It's on the What's Coming Up page at the moment - if they can take that, they can take a good, detailed, technical Entry on Visual Basic, believe me.

There is an attempt at a "Visual basic" guide entry which has been in Peer Review but the author seems to have abandoned it/us.

If they don't pick it up, you could incorporate it into your guide entry - which I hope you will consider. This is a considerable but very worthwhile undertaking.

specifically, check out http://www.bbc.co.uk/h2g2/guide/F48874&thread=89854

hope to be able to look at what you wrote once you reactivate it!

What I have decied to do is wait and see what happens with the Visual Basic programming Page, I would like to get togeter in a team to desine a few pages based on Visual Basic I meen not one person has said what BASIC stands for because yes it is an acarnim(SP?) Thanks

-- DoctorMO --

Visual Basic is a "backronym". This means that they invented a name for the language, BASIC, spelt in capitals because all computer languages were in capitals in those days. Then they thought, hey, it should stand for something, so they invented a stupic phrase which it was supposed to stand for (Beginner's All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code).

Since when was BASIC a good language for beginners to learn? I'm probably insane, but I always thought it would be better to teach people something like Smalltalk so they get to experience the joy of OOP. Teaching them BASIC only leads them to C, where they get entrenched and refuse to switch to C++.

Okay, so I'm biased - I like C++.

I don't like Visual Basic very much either. It keeps moaning at me when I put semicolons at the end of lines. What kind of language doesn't have semicolons at the end of lines?

Oh yes, Haskell doesn't. Or Scheme, or Lisp. But they're strange languages (I like them too )

Oh, my off-topic alarm just bleeped at me. I'd better stop.

The truth is there is no beginner's programming language - if you simplify, then you create bad habits - if you don't simplify, then your learning curve tends to the step function.

I really wanna try smalltalk at some point - but for some reason it's always scared me off. Argh! No Compiler!

VB (especially V5 and 6 - .Net is a whole new kettle of fish) is a good beginners language so long as it is taken in conjunction with learning good software engineering practice, data structures and algorithms, relational database use etc. It does require discipline to create maintainable code (and for a quite spectacular fee I can teach this) and it does not prevent you from writing gobbledegook code (and for an even more spectacualr fee I can debug this )
The "problem" with VB is that it is part of the big lie that "computers can be really simple". Thus people are encouraged by books like "Become an all singing all dancing Visual basic master in 24 hours" which is just plain nonsense.
*wonders were he was going with this...hmm. *

Ahh yes - "Become a VB Master in six easy lessons" - what fun!

hehhe, Oh what fun, I must admit that It has taken me 4 years to get down into visual Basic that includes API, Assembler add On's and all the other realy reat stuff, I'm going to forget C(C++) ever Existed It stinks, I'm going to go for Java and Assembler there are good and bad points to both but it is a balance. So nobody want to join me in making a visual basic page? although I bet we could come up with a good site on why not to go into VB.

-- DoctorMO --

Err... I think I'll continue on my mission to get everyone to learn Haskell instead, thanks.

But I wish you well!

"Err... I think I'll continue on my mission to get everyone to learn Haskell instead"

Whats Haskell? I've herd of some truly wierd names for software but that takes the sky

by the way, I've seen on the other guys Visual Basic said that visual basic is a object orentated language, but after some research I found out that it's atualy not an object orentated language it's a microsft fake off again.

-- DoctorMO --