Bait thread...

"But you can do that with VBA and Access," said the oblivion while talking about database solutions and web capabilities. Can't entirely blame the oblivion, because VBA is the only language they know. You're supposed to be common sense ignorant when you only know one language, no? Of course, I'm keeping the "oblivion" moniker, because the "expert" in question was performing his best wild leaping guessing, obvious enough from the rolling eyes and stuttering as he made up the reasons why VBA/Access was a good choice.

Which is fine, assuming that you only want MS computers to access your data. Also assuming (I really don't know, but this is a guess, because I've weaned myself off of MS's t*t over the years) you and everyone you expect to visit your site, uses IE and whatever else is crammed in there to screw with the "non-compliant".

BTW, where is the blazing red, flaming mad Icon, LQ?

I'm not saying VB or Access is horrible (outright), but you've got to admit, it's fun to mess with language fundamentalists, especially ones who believe billions==excellence.

i thought this was a fishing thread...

You can't fish with thread - you need proper fishing line.

I've taken classes of Java, C, C++, Visual Basic and many others languages. Although, my favorite language today is Java, I thought Visual Basic was pretty useful.

Today, peoples seems to trash Visual Basic, but if you need to develop an application/database driven, Visual Basic _will_ reduce time and eventually money when you deploy the application.

Not everything has to be portable, not every programming language has to be aimed to geeks either. We are living in a new era, if we can make a stable application in few lines of code, why would I waste a lot, and I mean it, a lot of time debugging a C application for bad usage of pointers here and there when all I need is a small application to register customers in a database? Visual Basic all the way. You can make that in a day.

The same in C/C++ would be a pain, you would need to pick up a graphics API as gtk or qt(and Visual Basic is faster then both of those API's, mind you) and have luck using mysql which simply won't work in my Slackware box. The same in Java would be ridiculously slow (as usual) plus, Swing is really bad to get a nice design, be it coding by hand or using Netbeans to design the UI.

VB is also useful to learn DirectX/Game programming without the need of making a similar "black magic ritual" to initialize a window, opengl/directX and other silly stuff...

Once again, we are living in a new era: Not everything has to be portable, not every programming language has to be aimed to geeks either...

VB has it's uses. It's the way to go if you want to make macros in MS Office, or if you want to plant a bug in MS Outbreak. :-)