Programming Excel

Question

I\'d like to give my boyfriend a taste of programming. If it was up to me, I\'d teach Scheme, Haskell or F# but since he\'d rather learn something that can be useful in his

Answer 1

VBA is VB6, in terms of runtime at least. It has enough OO capability to allow understanding of encapsulation and (sorta, without wanting to start a religious war) polymorphism/inheritance, if you'll accept that interfaces provide some aspects of those. If he spends a lot of time in Excel, then I'd expect there to be some repetitive things he does at present that could benefit from recording a macro, then learning to clean it up. That can lead to writing his own worksheet functions, loops, all kinds of useful stuff. If he's genuinely advanced (pop quiz: does he know about putting formulae in names? Is he comfortable with array formulae?) then there will be things that he's annoyed with where VBA can help.

I think I'd ignore .Net for now, it's too big and it will take too long for him to be able to produce his own solutions.

Alternatively, just teach him Ruby. It's what I'll be starting my kids on when they move on from Scratch.