I don't want to use Visual Basic!

I'm a 17 year old boy and I have a couple of years of experience with coding. At school we had to choose between a couple of things to do 2 hours every week. One of them was about computers and programming. Sounds fun, right?

The teacher is letting us code in Visual Basic in MS Excel. I tried to explain him that I know how to code, but he still wants me to listen to him.

He doesn't even use any indentation! I can't look at it and I don't want to use VB it sucks just let me use js or anything else but not VB! Why won't you just accept I'm 10 times better than you! Just let me do my thing!

Now he thinks he can challenge me with a password strength checker. I want to use js, some regex to make it very short and efficient and a nicely styled web page. But now I'll be forced to use a horrible programming language (VB) I never used before!

I am more concerned about being forced to use MS Excel than learning VB. Learning other programming languages is always beneficial. It helps you understand other programming languages later. I have a suggestion: If you have the time do it in js and VB. Then you can compare the advantages and disadvantages.

@theScientist Just by looking at the way he codes, I can see he doesn't have a lot of experience. I just don't want to look at someone who doesn't know how to code properly. I'll probably just use an online editor and make what he wants me to make, but just the way I want to make it.

@Danacus I know what you mean. I had to read some terrible code from 1 semesters. A simple program that should have taken 50 LOC ended up being 1000+ LOC due to copy paste and the lack of loops. However I was still able to learn from the code by taking a closer look as to what made it "bad code".

@MateTea42 I agree, learning a new language can only be beneficial, but I at least want to figure it out myself. Replicating code is just boring.

I am almost in the same situation but I don’t like the ‘script’ part of the word ‘javascript’.

@just-basic-user Why? What's wrong with it? I know many people dislike JavaScript, but I kinda like it. I guess that's just personal opinion. There are probably a lot of people who like VB too.

@Danacus I am ok with javascript, it’s a cool and very useful language but I don’t think that anyone likes VB.

@just-basic-user Yeah, that's why I don't want to use it. I tried to make a function in VB that returned a value, but it refused to work for some reason.

@Danacus VB=Python + 100*Harder + 1000*More useless.

@just-basic-user Yeah, true :D . I actually just want to show this to the teacher, but I'm way too shy and totally not self confident.

@Danacus My friends told me: “Just listen to him and act like you are interested”.

I sometimes even ask him stupid questions to make him feel superior, I need a good grade.

@just-basic-user Oh, it doesn't really matter that much. It's just an extra thing to fill our week. Nothing bad will happen if I don't listen to him actually. But maybe I should make him feel like he's good at it, because that's what teachers like.

@Danacus Pretty much.
Also, I think you have enough points for avatar if you want to make yourself one.

@just-basic-user Cool, I'll check it out.

@ignuit How did I not notice this? lol

Do it in VB, get used to stulid customer demands.
Do it well in VB and he'll see that you know what you're doing.

If you can do it well in anotger language, vb should be easypeasy. After you prove you can do it better than him, show how otger languages achieve the same but better.

Work with what you got, its good practice.
Good luck, stay stocked on coffee and aspirin.

VBA sucks horribly, but show him up.

He doesn't speak js or regex or anything else. So best him in his home arena -- it'll be easy -- and you'll likely earn his respect.

@Danacus I spent some time trying to make a function to concatiate hyperlinks in multiple cells of a word table into one cell today. Someone kill me. I'd forgotten how bad visual basic was (even though it was the first language I learnt to code in)

VBA is, well it should be dead to the world, but knowing it and being able to automate spreadsheet work is one of the greatest skills you could have, if you end up working in a sales oriented environment.

Generating reports in excel becomes a non thing as it’s always the same output just new input 😎

That 1-2 hour task can drop down to 5 minutes, leaving plenty of time for you to do more important dev work.

Also don’t get into the attitude that a language is below you.
This is a profession of never ending learning.

You’ve been doing this for 2 years?
I’m about to go into year 13.

I’ve seen a lot change in this time, and somethings fail to die, especially when Microsoft is involved.

Get rid of that attitude of yours. You sound like a brat by spouting things like "oh, look at me. I'm ten times better. All this is beneath me."

If you are so much better, then start helping other students who are not as experienced. Learning languages, yes even VB, can be quite useful. It broadens your horizon and let's you see ways how it is not done.

Learn to use such situations for your benefit and give up this overblown ego.

I had this last year but it was 5 hours a week, it was a struggle

VBA is indeed not a good choice to teach coding in school however it does have its advantages but only if you need to create some very fancy stuff in Excel or other office app.

For example, I once worked at an industrial manufacturing company which used lists with parts for assembly and welding. The list contained many items. They would print out the list from their CAD application, write everything by hand into more aggregated list and then create work order forms from them. For 1 machine (imagine something as big as a garage that can fit 4 cars, 2 stories high) they would be busy a whole week to do that.

One day they asked me if I could make them something in Excel to automate this and voila: I created a toolbar button that enabled them to select to machine they wanted to build straight from the CAD apps DB and then automatically generate all required item lists and the associated work order forms in a single excel doc in just a couple of minutes.

In that same company the sales manager build an app in Access which he called the <company name> Information System (call it CIS from now on). Everyone from sales dept was using this. Of course this was a very bad choice.

One day he came to me and asked if I could develop some new features for him. Of course I said.

Well... this guy was so horrible at coding that it was an enormous mess spaghetti. I just couldn't figure some things out. So he would help me as he was the one who made it after all. Many hours wasted, he couldn't even figure it out himself anymore. And then the day came that we got some remote locations. Access just wasn't able to handle the network latency and it became as good as unusable because it was so god damn slow.

So I ended up migrating all data to a mssql db and rebuild the whole damn thing as a web app.