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yogamerge's avatar
yogamerge
Visitor
12 years ago

Learning BrightScript Language

Hey guys,

I would really like to become better with BrightScript programming. I read that it was similar to Visual Basic, after playing around with Visual Basic, I can see some similarities. However, I wonder if it would truly be beneficial to learn Visual Basic for the purpose of BrightScript, or just stick solely with BrightScript? Thanks much.
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1 Reply

  • EnTerr's avatar
    EnTerr
    Roku Guru
    12 years ago
    No - do not learn VB if you don't already know it. It won't help you and may even confuse you because of similarities/differences. It is the same with human languages - learning two similar languages at the same time is a bad idea.

    Moreover, BS does not originate from VB - they have common roots, the BASIC language - and they have added extensions, like dynamic variable typing ("variant" in VB), dictionaries etc. But other things in B/S - like having only local variables (no globals and avoiding altogether the argument of lexical vs dynamic scope), the way "m." is used as self for object programming - those i haven't seen anywhere else and i know at least a dozen other programming languages to some degree.

    I think you should take BrightScript as-is; it's quirky but usable. Most quirks are in the components (under)implementations, which are separate from the language.