Hi, Tom,

Responses below.

----------------------------------
Richard Conn, ASE and PAL Manager
http://xenadu.home.mindspring.com/

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Team Ada: Ada Advocacy Issues (83 & 95)
> [mailto:[log in to unmask]]On Behalf Of Tom Moran
> Sent: Saturday, September 11, 1999 1:09 AM
> To: [log in to unmask]
> Subject: Re: Two interesting approaches to job hunting and more
>
>
> > And Visual Basic is a LOT easier ... my students all ran
> >their first GUI-oriented programs with various degrees of bells and
> >whistles after 1.5 hours of instruction and 1.5 hours of lab.
>   Do your Ada students use GUI Builders or thick bindings, and
> it still takes them more than 3 hours till first GUI program?

No, they don't use GUI Builders.  Ada is Ada and VB is VB.  GUIs are a
part of VB, and they are an add-on to Ada.  "Hello world" in Ada is
still using Text_IO ... "Hello world" in VB is drawing a form that contains
a button that launches another form (or message box) when pressed.  This
form or message box contains a graphic and the text of the message.
"Hello world" in Ada requires 5 lines of code (counting carriage returns),
while "Hello world" in VB requires the programmer to draw a picture and
write 1 line of code.

These are what I do on the first day in each class.  Who do you think gets
more excited?  ;-)

Microsoft goes me a lot better ... in their Learning VB package (which
contains a scaled-down VB and a multimedia tutorial), "Hello World" is
a slot machine.  One of my students bought this Learning VB package for $30.

> p.s. In original BASIC "PRINT 2+2" was *really* quick to learn.

Yep ... so is drawing a picture and writing a message box command in VB.
VB is by no means BASIC, altho you can see the BASIC in your one line of
code.