It would be nice if we could program computers by giving them lists of instructions in English or French, but computers are not able to understand natural languages. Instead, we must program them in relatively simple programming languages. A computer program is a list of instructions for a computer to follow to accomplish some task, just as a recipe is a list of instructions for a cook to follow.
Programming languages are much less expressive and more rigid and clumsier to use than natural languages -- you have to spell things out in great detail and without any spelling or grammar errors. The good news is that they are easy to learn, and, once you have learned one, it is relatively easy to learn another. Many of the basic concepts are the same. Each language has its pros and cons, but they are more alike than different, and many tasks can be programmed in whichever language the programmer prefers.
BASIC is one of many programming languages. It was invented in 1964 as a teaching language. In those days, computers were very expensive and used by techies. Two Dartmouth professors, John Kemeny and Thomas Kurtz decided that liberal arts students should also learn to program -- not to become professional programmers, but to practice thinking about procedures and to learn something of how computers work and what they can and can not do. Today, many of us see the value in that, but Kemeny and Kurtz were definitely ahead of their time.
They invented a simple, programming language and called it BASIC (beginners, all purpose instruction code). BASIC was one of the first language designed for teaching rather than solving real problems. Pascal was another.
BASIC was primarily used for teaching for many years. When the first low-cost personal computers came on the market in 1975, Bill Gates and Paul Allen dropped out of school to write a BASIC interpreter and founded Microsoft.
People realized they could program simple, but useful applications on these personal computers using Microsoft BASIC. As they began writing real programs, programmers wanted more features and capabilities, and Microsoft BASIC began to evolve. When programs with graphical user interfaces became possible and popular, Microsoft developed Visual BASIC. The latest version, Visual BASIC.NET, is a modern programming language that is suitable for many applications. BASIC is now probably the most commonly used programming language.
That is the good news. The bad news is that you can no longer learn it in two or three lectures, as did students who took Professor Kurtz' class at Dartmouth in 1964.
VB.NET is the latest version of BASIC from Microsoft. Visual Studio.NET is the development system we will use to write our VB.NET programs. Visual Studio.NET can be used to develop programs in other languages as well.