Читать книгу Beginning Programming All-in-One For Dummies - Wallace Wang - Страница 52

One of the first programming languages designed specifically to teach beginners is BASIC (short for Beginner’s All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code). Although BASIC is one of the oldest programming languages around, it isn’t used often in commercial applications. Currently the most popular version of BASIC is Microsoft’s Visual Basic, which made designing user interfaces (UIs) easy.

However, Visual Basic has fallen out of favor despite its initial popularity. Even worse from a financial point of view, BASIC programmers usually earn less than C programmers, even if they’re doing the exact same job. Part of the reason is that BASIC suffers from the perception that it’s a toy language — unsuitable for commercial use. Although that was true at one time, the BASIC language has evolved to the point where it can do almost anything C or other languages can do.

Microsoft created both Visual Basic and C# as nearly equivalent programming languages, so when you learn Visual Basic, you’ll find it’s easy to learn C#.

Although you can use BASIC to create anything from satellite navigation systems to Wall Street financial trading programs, BASIC programmers will probably always get paid less, so you’ll need to know another language like C anyway, just to get paid more and have more opportunities. Because BASIC programmers tend to get paid less than other programmers, many programmers feel that they may as well skip BASIC and just figure out C instead.

However, if you want a much simpler introduction to programming, learning BASIC through Visual Basic or another version of BASIC will be far easier than learning C. When you understand the principles of programming through BASIC, learning another programming language will be much easier.