November 1, 2003
We have been programming in BASIC for over 25 years. There were times when we even liked it. Like instead of punched cards, before Turbo C, and now with VB.NET. But if cavemen BASIC programmers could be brought back to life via DNA -- they'd hardly recognize today's Visual Basic.
BASIC is said to be the most popular programming language because, well, it's basic. As in easy to understand and use. That was the case, back when coders could live free and be wild by not declaring their variables. But 25 years later, life is very different.
Nowadays seat belts, air bags, hard hats, safety glasses, and steel toed shoes are mandatory. Visitor safety orientation can take four hours. OSHA is peering around every corner, and the EPA is looking under very rock.
Which all means -- you are now expected to use
"Option Explicit" to declare every variable.
The wild and fancy free days of BASIC are long gone -- never to return.
You no longer are suppose to use variable names like i, j, and k. Now you use full variable names (no abbreviations) that have meaning and subroutine names that start or end with a verb. You use Hungarian notation, a three letter prefix and are free to make names up to 255 characters long.
And to think back 20 years ago to when we were limited to eight character variables names. How did we ever do it?
Twenty years ago, one small book taught you everything you needed to know about the handful of BASIC commands. Today's VB.NET language reference book contains hundreds of VB types, functions, statements, classes, constants, enumerations, fields, methods, objects, properties, and other keywords. But what it really takes is a rather large library of 500 to 1,000 page books (and lots of caffeine) to thoroughly understand the scope and breadth of the (additional) thousands of objects, methods, properties, and events that you can use with VB.
Many have tried -- but few have conquered. Unless it's all you do -- forget about trying to learn everything you can do with VB.
It's been very uncool to use OPEN#, INPUT#, and PRINT# commands for years now. Even using the FileSystemObject is no longer cool. Now it's System.IO.Something or System.IO.Another.
You're even suppose to stop using MsgBox and use System.Windows.Forms.MessageBox.Show instead. It's more understandable by programmers that use other .NET languages. Like our mothers really care.
And for you up-tight, coat-and-tie, politically correct programmers that have never drank a beer while programming -- they created a special new statement just for you . It's called "Option Strict" where everything has to be perfectly declared, cast, converted, ordered, enforced, framed, methodical, systematic, organized, authorized and delegated. You can't even spit shine your wingtips the wrong way and expect to compile a program using "Option Strict".
You would think that something called "singletons" would be simple and harmless -- but it takes 10 pages to describe a simple singleton application.
My oh my. Dancing Dorothy and Toto computer animations are so right. I don't think we're in BASIC any more.
Twenty years ago you were impressive if you could write a simple, text based, operator interface that directed a program to read & write simple text data files. Today we think nothing about it taking only a few lines of code to instantly read a complex database from a computer half way around the world.
Don't get us wrong. We think you can turn "Option Explicit" off, not declare your variables, use i, j, and k, and get along just like in the old days. Problem is -- no one around here has tried that in ten years. How do we know you can still do it?
Click here to download an Excel spreadsheet of a usage analysis of BASIC commands from 20 years ago
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