Taking Visual Basic and Cobol Soon

[JockVSJock]

To finish my Associates degree in programming this summer, I need to take Cobol I and II and Visual Basic.

My knowledge of the two is this. Cobol is on its way out, and Visual Basic is pretty easy to write stuff in, thus alot of the virus that we get.

Can anyone give me some input on learning these languages and possibly using them in the Linux world. For example, learning Visual Basic, could help me with QT, correct?

thanks

[Icarus]

Visual Basic...I don't know about with QT, but it's a very pointless language

Cobol...I liked it, but it will only be useful if you run across someone looking for an AS/400 (mainframe) programmer or something...and the need for those ended at the beginning of 2000.

[bwkaz]

VB and Cobol... well, VB might help you get a job somewhere in an MS-only place (actually, I use it every day where I work, and I don't like it as much because of that), but the language itself really sucks quite a bit. At least, as of version 6 it did. That's what happens when you take a language expressly developed for teaching and try to get it accepted for general-purpose programming; you fail miserably.

As for Cobol, I don't know, but I'd guess that mahdi's right. I don't see much of a need for Cobol programmers now that Y2K has passed us by...

Will VB help you with Qt? Likely not. Qt uses C++, which (if you haven't seen it) is nothing like VB, other than superficial similarities to the braindead "object"-oriented parts of VB.

I think it was Edsger Dijkstra who said "BASIC has ruined more good programmers than ..." something, I can't remember the rest of the quote. :(

[Icarus]

You know how to Google bwkaz ;)
When Micro-soft moved to Seattle in 1979 (leaving behind the hyphen), most of its revenue came from sales of BASIC, a horrible language so dependant on GOTOs that spaghetti looked more orderly than its code did. (BASIC has ruined more promising programmers than anything else, prompting its original inventor Dartmouth University to issue a public apology in 1986.) Interesting reading also http://humorix.org/articles/feb00/linux-history2.shtml

And I've known a few people that knew COBOL very well, which severly hindered their C learning...

[bwkaz]

D'oh!

Yeah, I do, duh... ;)

[JockVSJock]

Thanks for the input everyone.

No wonder I have waited until the end to takes these two classes.

Unfortunally the senior instructors set what classes have to be taken, not local businesses, and it seems that the senior instructors are way out of touch, especially with the cobol.

thanks

[AdaHacker]

Actually, Dijkstra had something to say (http://www.cs.virginia.edu/~evans/cs655/readings/ewd498.html) about both BASIC and COBOL It is practically impossible to teach good programming to students that have had a prior exposure to BASIC: as potential programmers they are mentally mutilated beyond hope of regeneration. The use of COBOL cripples the mind; its teaching should, therefore, be regarded as a criminal offence. In all fairness, VB is better than many of the old-school BASICs, but it still kind of sucks. However, it is good if you need to develop small business programs quickly, which a lot of companies do, so it will definitely help you get a job. Sure, it's a Windows-only language, but let's face it - most companies that develop a lot of small business programs (banks, insurance companies, etc.) are Windows-only on their desktop systems anyway, so it doesn't make any difference.

As for COBOL, there's still a lot of legacy COBOL systems floating around that need to be maintained, so I can see why they would still teach it. Of course, they would probably want someone with experience (I've never seen an add for an entry-level COBOL programmer), but there are still jobs.

[Arcane_Disciple]

My school still teaches COBOL, until recently we had to take two semesters of it.

Our profs know that its getting out dated, but the CS dept has such a high placement rate is because we have to know COBOL and Assembly to graduate.