Are Visual Basic or Delphi good languages to start with?
No, because they’re not portable. There are no open-source implementations of these languages, so you’d be locked into only those platforms the vendor chooses to support. Accepting that kind of monopoly situation is not the hacker way. Visual Basic is especially awful. The fact that it’s a proprietary Microsoft language is enough to disqualify it, and like other Basics it’s a poorly-designed language that will teach you bad programming habits. One of those bad habits is becoming dependent on a single vendor’s libraries, widgets, and development tools. In general, any language that isn’t supported under at least three different vendors’ operating systems is a poor one to learn to hack in.
