All you ever wanted to know about programming, and more.

How am I able to say “all you ever wanted to know about programming and more”? Well, I’ve been a lecturer in IT and specialized in programming subjects. That’s why I can say “all about programming”, but the “and more” I can do because nobody can ever know all there is to know about programming. It changes all the time, so you have to keep on learning.

 I learned very quickly that I don’t know everything, but I also learned that I can usually find the missing pieces somewhere. Nowadays it’s reasonably easy, because of the World Wide Web and things like Google and other search engines. And we’ll go on a journey together to find all the interesting stuff out there.

By the way there’s a difference between the World Wide Web (www) and the Internet. The Internet is the network of technology distributed all over the world, while the www is the pages which are stored all over this web of technology.

OK, back to programming. There’s a plethora of programming languages and new ones get added ever so often. As technology advanced the programming languages like COBOL, FORTRAN, BASIC, Pascal, C etc. all had to advance to make use of the new technology.

When the technology gets too far ahead of what the programming language is supposed to do, it becomes a problem. A horse drawn cart can be made better up to a certain point, but to be able to make use of the internal combustion engine to its full potential, they had to start on a new design.

The same happens to programming. To be able to make use of the technology of the Internet, and also cope with its limitations, new programming languages had to be developed.

On this website we’ll start out looking at C# and, the little bit easier, Visual Basic.

So hi there, welcome to the wonderful world of programming.

Frans Van Wyk

PS. You can go to the language that interests you by clicking on the menu item above.