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Ask HN: Convincing teacher on Python vs VB.net [an update]

1 points by newsisan ↗ HN
Thanks a ton for the responses in the other thread (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1885594).

I have now found out that the main reason he would rather do VB.net is because he isn't sure that it Python is easy to use databases with (SQL I'm guessing).

Being a non-programmer currently, I am not really sure, but I would assume that it is just as easy to interact with SQL through Python compared to VB.net?

Could anyone write something that I could show or relay to him?

2 comments

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madhouse
While I do not know VB.net at all, or how hard or easy it is to access databases with it, Python has quite a few modules to ease DB access.

http://www.sqlalchemy.org/ would be a good starting point, in my opinion.

mryan
Yes, it is very easy to interact with databases from Python. There are libraries available for all of the popular DB engines, as well as great database abstraction layers like http://www.sqlalchemy.org/

Depending on how much of a non-programmer you are, it might be worth investing the time learning to write a basic script which interacts with a database. Writing this in both Python and VB.net should demonstrate that the task is simple enough in either language.

If you manage to convince him that Python can access DBs as simply as VB.net, I suspect he will come up with yet another reason why he prefers VB - in my experience, people always shift the goalposts in situations like this. Once you have answered about ten of these 'objections', he will probably put his foot down and say 'Well, I still say we use VB.net, and I am the teacher, so deal with it".