I recently had the opportunity to program with an old friend of mine, as he had an idea, simple in concept, that he was interested in working on. We used Visual Basic, as only programs as a hobby and never bothered to use any other languages. I haven’t had occasion to use VB for several years; it was the second language I learned (the first being QBasic) but I never really got into it; the visual bit seemed easy enough, but the objects and object-like behaviors of several of the visual elements were confusing and bothersome.
I started programming today not really remembering any of that, but I remembered quickly enough. Luckily, I know enough now to explain exactly why I find Visual Basic confusing and bothersome: it’s a strongly typed language, with many classes that have as data types other classes, yet for the data fields of the built-in objects there’s no way to tell exactly what the type of the data even is. This presents a problem when, for instance, you want to set the background color of a shape object, decipher the format used to store the color (standard hex code wrapped in a weird little header and footer), and try to set the new color to something else. Why? Because you can’t pass it a string with the data formatted the way it is when presented in the frontend. It just gives you a type error without even telling you what the type should be.
There may be a conversion function that takes a string and turns it into whatever format the color is actually stored in, but it isn’t called automatically, and without specific information as to what the destination type is I can’t look it up or write it myself.
All of which is a longwinded way of saying that I still haven’t found a way to create a graphical, desktop program that I find simple. This I find somewhat dismaying.
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