I want to start learning programming. What should I start with?

[slacker164]

DaSimkin said:

slacker164 said:
I'd strongly recommend Visual Basic(VB). It's most useful for business type programming (databases etc.), but you can do just about anything with it and it's quite easy to learn. The programming concepts you learn will carry over to pretty much any other language and many beginner books (if you're learning on your own) will even use some directdraw/3D functions and game examples. You'll want to move on to C/C++ etc. eventually, but VB is somewhat designed as a learning language, yet still more capable than many give it credit for

How is VB more useful for business type programming? That's complete and utter jibberish.

VB is SHIT. Yes you can do a lot with it. But you can't do it well.

Learn almost any other language and you are better off.

I said it's most useful(where it works best), not more useful(than <insert language here>)--big difference. And it's useful because you can do things fast and it has a lot of integrated tools for quickly connecting to databases. Rather than fussing with connection strings and syntax you can practically drag+drop a db connection if you work with Access or MS SQL, and it's not much more work to connect to MySQL or other db types. It cuts GUI building time way, way down. There's a price to pay in performance, but in a business/database environment it doesn't make much difference since the backend SQL is the bottleneck. 

 As far as learning another language, learn another one later. You're not much of a programmer if you don't know a few. VB is great for teaching concepts and does indeed have a place in real world situations.