Questions for Programmers

Merry Christmas everyone!!!!!!

I have decided I want to learn some programming and realised it is very hard to find solid information to even get started.

I have no plans on developing the next Zenno or scrapebox and I am starting with 0 knowledge or experience.

Im not looking for the easiest language, rather the best language for what I would realisticly want to use it for so Python and Ruby are not on my list of conciderations.

I know it will take a year or 2 to even learn enough to do something usefull and I am fine with that. Im not going to use this for a job or have any dreams of developing the next great IM program. Im not in a rush so I don't care how hard or how long it might take to learn, this is just a personal thing for fun and something to do in my free time.

I know it is hard to say what would be best for me so I will try to give some examples of what I am currently thinking. I would like the ability to change my mind later if I need to and still have the language be suitable.

I could see myself wanting eventually to make my own desktop app that helps me organize things. So I would think I would want it to be able to work very well with office apps.

I could also see myself wanting to create my own app to help me keep track of IM related stuff, so I would also like it to work well with websites and servers.

I would also like to be able to make an app that would be able to gather information from websites efficiently, not like a scraper but lets say information from real time streaming quotes or SEC comany filings,not really the whole thing but just collect the information I find usefull or important for me and the way I evaluate stocks.After the information is collected and saved into some sort of database I would like to be able to set perameters that would have the program tell me what stocks meet my perameters so I could manually do more in dept research.

I might not ever develope enough skills to do any of that but just off the top of my head those are some things I would love to be able to do.

I got the impression that VB.Net would be the best suited for me because I would like to be able to work with office apps, pulling in information and exporting the information and it seemed like the .net framework also was great because It would never go away just get upgraded.

It seems that VB.net is hated by everyone that doesnt use it and C# is a much more preferred way to go.

I guess I have decided to go with VB.net, VB, C++, or C# but am really confused by the differences in VB and VB.Net.

I have Visual Studio 2012 and am not sure if I could work with VB.Net in the IDE but have not been able to get ahold of VB sudio.net so far. Maybe you can clear things up and I don't need it or maybe won't want it anyway.

Thanks in advance, I know this is almost as bad as asking what is better blue or green but Im just trying to figure out where I need to start looking.

I would say go with C#. It would probably be best for what you are looking for. VB.net has some issues when creating programs like these and may not be as efficient. Also, C# is better to learn for long term use.

I too would say go from C#, if you ever decide in the future to expand your programming language portfolio you'll be able to pick up a lot of languages pretty quickly due to similarities to C#.

.NET Framework also provides you with quite a lot of pre-made useful classes that are great for making office style applications. The Visual Studio IDE is the best application IDE by far in my opinion, but personally I prefer Visual Studio 2010, seems more stable and it's much easier to get your desired GUI layout using 2010. The only difference is that 2012 can code for .NET 4.5 but I really doubt you would use any features that 4.0 doesn't have.

With Visual Studio 2012 you just load Visual Studio and when you create a new project you choose what language you want to use, there is no separate applications for the different languages like there used to be.

If you're a complete noob, I'd suggest you to start with C to have a grasp of basic concepts of a programming language. Once you learn the basics jump off to C# or VB.net. If you're going to develop only small applications there won't be any difference between C# or VB.net except the syntactical difference. Learning C# would be good if you plan to develop applications of next level involving different libraries.

This gets brought up quite a bit over in the Programming section of the forum.

I love old-school C and use it every day along with a few other obscure languages. I would never reccomend that anyone in the marketing field learn it however as there are far better options. VB has a pretty deep following of haters following its outgrowth in the late 90s/early 2000s as a seperate entity from Visual C++. With the release of the .NET framework, VC/VC++ and VB came together under one roof and spawned C#/VB.NET. VB in its original form is no longer around as far as I know, though Visual C++ is I beleive - someone more knowledgable than me can fill in the details.

In any case, the .NET languages take whatever laguage the program was originally written in and translates it to an intermediate language called MSIL (Microsoft Intermediate Language). This code is then executed against the .NET runtime. This also makes the code platform dependent, as Microsoft naturally doesn't want to support any other operating system besides its own (MONO people: stfu). This may or may not be an issue for you.

Personally, I would go with Ruby or Python as I think they are more network-centric and platform indepedent than VB.NET or C#, but that is your call. As an aside - googling for info on C# is tough because the name is short and it has a special character, so you will need to be adept at picking out C and C++ results from your queries. The upside is that Microsoft has some excellent documentation avaliable for free. For most people, new coders especially, full-on compiled desktop applications are brittle overkill that have limited extensibility. I would hesitate to step into that arena unless you know for sure it is what you need.

Thanks Soap,

If I understand you correctly now the .net languages are all the same instead of having VB and VB.net or C# and C#.net ?

Im not really concerned about cross platform as I am anti Mac myself and starting from scratch with no intention of doing this for money .

I decided I would like to learn a middle option instead of something like Python or Ruby so If I get any good at this I could switch languages without to much trouble. I didn't want to go to where I also had to worry about managing the CPU and everything to start with so I figured C or C++ would not be right for me also.

I didn't notice there was a programming section, sorry about that. I took a look and everyone seems to have their own preferance so I guess I will try to jump in with C# and if I need to switch up later.

I would have to say starting with C++ is best IMO. C++ is a very versatile language, just like it's mother C, and will definitely work for what you want to do, and then expand to C# from it is not very difficult. C# is okay, I don't like because of the .NET framework though. Happy Holidays!

C# is a Rapid Application Development language. It is more comparable to Java than C/C++.
Why some people suggest starting with C/C++, while the basic programming concepts can be learnt using any language. Not to speak that C/C++ syntax is very similar to C#. I spent 6 months learning C and than C++ and than moved to C#(after .NET 2.0 was introduced). I regret wasting my time learning C/C++. While they have their purposes(few friends are programming microcontrollers using C), they don't have a place in the modern programming environment.
You can easily migrate from desktop environment to Web Apps using C#, well the windows hosting is a little more expensive but who cares spending a few more bucks per month.

Syntactically they are all different, VB.NET still looks like visual basic and C# still looks like kindergarten C. When you hit compile though the compiler takes it to an intermediate language that you typically won't ever see, and this is what is run against the runtime. Since they are both compiled to the same intermediate language, the run about the same speed.

I'm not a huge Microsoft fan myself, but if you are going to run an IDE they are probably second to none. Their compiler is also on par with, if not faster than, gcc. Not a lot of people from the Linux scene like to admit that but it is true.

.NET is probably a good choice, I would lean toward C# as opposed to VB.NET however as C# is similar syntax-wise to a host of other languages. If you ever decide to migrate that will make the transition a bit easier.

I have 12 years experience of coding with C#.

I can tell you that world is build upon C++. Every important software is built using C++, Say operating system, webbrowser, webserver, everything !!

Nothing can beat C++.