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  • Writer's pictureLaurence Wingo

My Yellow Brick Road Journey with VB.NET, Swift, and Python

We’ve all heard the term that students are like a sponge. In my experience, I’ve always found that due to nature vs. nurture various students have super powers. The reason this blog article is titled after the movie, ’The Wiz’ is because we all have heard how important it is to know how to code but I think the true depth of why pushes the agenda forward independently. Personally, I’ve learned that while studying social sciences there would be theories that showed ambiguity which meant sometimes there wouldn’t be a complete right or wrong answer which feels overwhelming in a world of so much information. However, when I write code I get the sense that I’m creating something based on strong logic with minimal error since computers doesn’t necessarily use bias or judgement. I’d personally like to write code that helps clinicians analyze data that measures side effects or consequences from choices they’ve made in medicine. In my opinion, it may help to relate computer programming literacy to real life thought processes in order to write flow expressions and decision operators such as if/then/else in a more fluid fashion. After providing a two way street from teaching iOS development to college adults, I’ve noticed that it wasn’t hard for a person to think and it was a fairly easy process verbally translating symbols on a computer screen to match their thought process known as understanding programming language syntax.


After working in the real world in technical positions while taking the time to study various theories from social sciences, I now prefer to spend more time on the natural sciences such as neuroscience, mathematics, and machine learning where there isn’t much ambiguity (i.e. linear algebra, calculus, statistics, and computational neuroscience). Obtaining a 2nd interview at a local hospital for a full-time programmer analyst position while segueing into teaching high school students computer programming the following week could be my one-way ticket back to Kansas with Toto. I make the Toto reference because when you’re exploring college, you’re typically evaluating your life’s interests versus doing activities for money (unless you’re a business major) so I was a dog walker in between classes for a giant schnauzer. The schnauzer was also a service dog in which it taught me patience and discipline along the yellow brick road of programming.


Currently, I’ve decided this was the best time to give myself a high level overview of Visual Basic, Visual Basic Applications, and VB.NET. Visual Basic’s object oriented language is useful today for building Windows desktop programs, windows phone applications, and website applications. I think of the aforementioned process as building for the windows operating system using Visual Studio solution files instead of building iOS and MacOS applications in Xcode using workspaces even though they both have similarities in terms of using user interface objects forming object oriented programming principles. What currently interests me about the opportunity of acknowledging and using Visual Basic languages is the opportunity to enhance my own mathematical knowledge on the computer which leads to writing machine learning code by planning my code that uses the correct number data types in order to save memory. The .NET framework reminds me of the Cocoa or Cocoa Touch API while keeping in mind that the .NET platform is for Windows and the latter is for MacOS and iOS. Another interesting similarity is that if you delete the obj and bin folder from a project in order to share it with another developer, this process reminds me of cleaning a project in Xcode which deletes data in the derived folder on MacOS. A caveat of the .NET framework is that the framework doesn’t care which language you use weather it be Visual Basic, C#, Cobalt.NET, or C++.NET while Cocoa and Cocoa Touch applications are typically written in Objective-C or Swift. This blogging journey of learning Visual Basic’s syntax is helpful in becoming a programming God by taking the time to comprehend programming logic beyond only understanding the object oriented architecture or glue that holds everything together. I think VB.NET will also help me become more accustomed to whitespacing and tabs similar to the syntax of Python.


Of course, Python is an interpreted language (translated on the fly) which can be used for predictions in data analytics while Swift and the family of Visual Basic languages are compiled (before code execution) which means its slower after being translated from human readable code to a native language understandable by the computers CPU. Human Resources data from tables in databases. Targeting specific result sets that we want from our data An example of the fields in a table would be first name, last name, clinician type, if their salary is above $30,000 a year, full-time employee. I may have to create reports with sorts by employees last name. A GROUP BY function would allow us to group all internal medicine physicians together from a table that has all physicians listed in it. A SELECT statement would select specific fields of a table and the WHERE clause is similar to programming logic in order to find specific values within the selected tables and the FROM clause would illustrate which table to pull this data from in the database. Computed Fields in Embedded SQL is similar to the process of binning and aggregating data in the cardiac health exercise I did recently and I’m going to link to that article here. I can use summation functions such as the sum, average, min, or max values of a field similar to Python data analytics libraries such as Numpy and SciPy. SQL row limitation is similar to normalization to remove duplicate records. In terms of application programming, Visual Basic has similar capabilities of object oriented programming in which was eventually added to the language. VB.Net is more object oriented but VBA itself is not object oriented. In VBA, we can create properties with setters and getters, methods, initializers, calculated properties, and private properties. Classes in VBA Access are typically referred to as class modules. In VB.NET, all objects have three things which are properties, methods, and events. Properties define what an object can or cannot do. Methods are things that an object knows how to do. Events is something that will trigger our code.




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