r/Glasgow Tools

Title
Authorzellisgoatbond
Comment
That being said, I think there's been a fair few issues with things becoming more up to date - I'm not sure if there's specific research on this (I would be very interested to find out!), but my experience is that, for everyone I know who did CS at school in Scotland, from all different types of school, their primary programming language was Visual Basic.

Visual Basic isn't an especially egregious choice as a first language, and it does some things quite well (having a WYSIWYG GUI designer built in can be quite useful) but there's considerably better choices that have cropped up especially in the past few years - Python or Java would probably be my preferred options.

I think a lot of the challenges of teaching programming at school level is that, especially with the likes of Visual Basic, there's a lot of extra verbose gubbins that bloats programs and shifts the focus away from problem solving.

For instance, I dug out my copy of my Advanced Higher project a few years back. The project itself wasn't terribly complicated - the core of a project is taking an input and checking whether it's in a given list - and I could probably implement the majority of it in a day now, but while the code is properly commented, there's just a lot of mess and faff that has very little to do with the problem itself (e.g a big mess of spaghetti to deal with relative file paths).

I also think a fair issue is that, on the whole, people using Visual Basic are not especially accomplished programmers. So advice online tends to be poor.
Reddit Linkhttps://www.reddit.com/r/glasgow/comments/d5x012/jpmorgan_chase_announces_plans_for_glasgow/f0skul3/
CreatedThu 19th Sep 2019 4:22pm
Status ()

Back to deleted posts list