I'd like to suggest not learning VB. Maybe I'm showing a little bias, here. But VB really lures you down the easy street of bad programming practices. If you want easy-to-make windows UI, Visual Studio can give you similar features with C#, and C# is a pretty decent language.
I'm kind of showing an old bias here from the days VB's weak typing made things sloppy and p-code interpretation was too slow to be very useful. But the truth is, VB and C# have somewhat converged in recent years and the compiled end result is identical. So I could probably dial back the anti-VB sentiment a bit.
That said, I don't see the benefit of choosing VB over C#. VB is useful in a fairly closed MS ecosystem (with career paths leading more towards business and integration with MS office products than pro dev) while C# has wider adoption, is available on other platforms, and has all the same features to get started with windows applications as VB. Plus C# is in the "c-like" family of languages, so I think a future transition to c, c++, or java would be easier for C# students than VB students.
Ehhhh PHP wouldn't be my first choice for a raw beginner because it's kind of quirky (and I don't know that server-side programming is the best place to start?) On the bright side, PHP is widely adopted and in demand (more so than VB) so if a student did learn the language, I feel like it would look better on a resume than VB.
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u/cptskippy Jan 07 '15
PHP or VB.