LISP/VBA Training

[wannabe]

Actually I am confident now. Looking at your code makes perfect sense.

[swestbrook60]

Your young enough to learn as much as you want if you set your mind to it. But I would consider what Autodesk is "planning" for the future before I just started hitting the books. We dont have a concrete date, but we know that at some point VBA is going to either stop working or be so slow (as an out of process function) that it wont really be a good option. It could be next year, it could be 3-5 years away, we just dont know. Does that mean you shouldn't learn VBA? By all means NO, its a great language to start with, and will give you a basis if you choose to move on to .Net.

 

LISP is a completely different animal. Knowing LISP is important because it allows you to create commands to call your VBA commands, as that cannot be done directly in VBA. For me, the hardest part of learning a new language was when my brain compared it t the LISP I already knew, and it didn't work that way.

 

If I had to start fresh, with no knowledge learned thus far, I would just dive into .Net. Its going to be around for a long time.

 

Your correct that Microsoft has stopped all development of VBA,in fact only large customers like AutoDesk can get it anymore. Just as a side note, VisualLISP isn't supported or developed either. The new application platform for AutoDesk products will be VSTA (Visual Stiudio Tools for Applications) and while I have not tried it yet, AutoDesk says that VBA applications can be ported to the new VSTA environment. I believe Revit is already using VSTA.

 

Overall I would not get to wrapped up in what the language is, the differences in syntax will most likely be minor. Programming is more about the logical process than it is about the syntax or executing what you need to do. Other than something like FORTRAN 77, every language gradually changes to adapt to the next generation of technology and that is what I meant by saying that programming is just a continual process of education. Who knows where we will be 5, 10, 20 or 30 years from now.