Re: Beginners'
This. True BASIC (like the "Locomotive BASIC" I learned to program on, on the dear old Amstrad CPC in the late '80s) is very much a procedural, run-time interpreted language. It would have no idea what you meant if you started talking about objects. You had integers, "numbers" and strings and that was your lot.
VB is an attempt at an object-based version, and its younger, more virile cousin, Visual Basic .Net is just a wrapper around the .Net CLR, for those who don't want to learn C#.
And to be fair to "real" BASIC, it does teach people some of the fundamental programming concepts that higher level languages might abstract away, such as how everything is just an integer under the hood (in the case of the Amstrad CPC, usually an 8-bit one, and occasionally a 16-bit one).
Learning BASIC led me onto learning the Z80 instruction set (in an attempt to write things that didn't take an age to run). I was a pre-teen at the time, so most of the things I tried to write just froze or crashed the machine, but it set me up for a career as a software developer later on in life, and although most of the things I do these days are in high-level languages, that basis in knowing how a computer actually works is invaluable, especially in writing efficient code.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
