11 ms·

Visual Basic Turns 25

184 points by mikerg87 10y ago

whatnotests 10y ago
IIRC Microsoft killed Visual Basic with the introduction of VB.Net back around 2000. Why are they celebrating its birthday?
- giancarlostoro 10y ago
  I honestly wished they would of somehow open sourced Visual Basic 6, it was quite interesting being able to create software rapidly and easily that couldn't be "decompiled" the way .NET / Java applications can be reversed back from bytecode. Unlike Delphi / Pascal which are a bit harder to just pick up and learn by comparison (try just giving a child Delphi, and then give them VB6 and see which one they could work quicker in). I think VB.NET had not much of a point with a language like C# around. Maybe they should of redone some parts of Visual Basic .NET to make it more adaptable by all programmers. Multi-line comments is one thing I wished it had.
  - jarcane 10y ago
    There is Gambas, which while not a clone in the way FreeBASIC is of QuickBASIC, is at least intended to provide a similar experience. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gambas https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gambas
  - lazarus101 10y ago
    At that time open source was "cancer" to Microsoft
- ZanyProgrammer 10y ago
  Because it brings out the nostalgia for people. Also a way to signal how long you've been programming, or that you stared programming early on in life.
- bdcravens 10y ago
  VBA is still shipping in Office 2016
  - cm2187 10y ago
    Pressing ALT-F11 in Office 2016 is quite depressing. They haven't spent even a minute improving anything in 15 years. It's quite shocking for a functionality which is so critical to so many people and companies.
  - therealmarv 10y ago
    VBA is the reason Visual Basic will never die gracefully.
    - cm2187 10y ago
      And microsoft is pushing for people to use javascript instead. If you think that VBA code written by novice programmers looks bad, I think you should look at javascript written by novice programmers. A guy was trying to draw a line and decided to do it pixel by pixel by adding "div" of 1px by 1px to the DOM, and each pixel was added with a callback!
- WorldMaker 10y ago
  To Microsoft, VB.NET is still Visual Basic. They didn't kill VB, they made a new version that was different. The VB.NET compiler version numbers even start from 7 as it was/is considered the successor.
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
russnewcomer 10y ago
I have a lot of fond memories of VB6, as I started using it for an internship in college, when then I got hired full-time after graduation to keep up the app, as the sole developer/IT professional at the company. VB6 had its flaws, certainly, but as a 21 year old kid figuring out how to architect a software system, get projects done, and get the system working on the existing Novell Netware infrastructure, I didn't need to fight with C++ or deal with the vagaries of Delphi. VB6 was a great tool, VB.NET became a different tool, and I wish for the sake of not-really-programmers everywhere, VB7 had existed.
giancarlostoro 10y ago
In a few more days I'll be 26. I started programming with Visual Basic 6, since then I have moved on. From time to time though, I can't help but try it out again now and then. I've seen many programmers start out with it and move on through the field into other languages. Many interesting projects have been made in Visual Basic 6 alone. Everything from private server software, to game cheating tools (packet injections), online rpg game engines, and so on and so forth (and throw in malware in there somewhere too). I am grateful for Visual Basic despite having moved from it, I know many despised it, and some of that group once coded in it, but I have to appreciate my roots despite the good or the bad I still learned programming through VB6. Thank you to whoever has ever worked on Visual Basic 6. Happy belated birthday as well.
- khedoros 10y ago
  I'm 5 years older. I started in Qbasic and moved to VB4 or 5 pretty soon after that. I've left them behind, but I've got a similar feeling about those languages. These days, I guess I'd do some TK thing in Python if I was going for speed of development, but that seems a few steps backwards from what I could do (almost) 20 years, in a few ways.
ibdknox 10y ago
Despite much of the hate VB has gotten over the years, it served an insanely important purpose in the rise of internal business software. When I was at MSFT, me and the PM who owned the compilers for VB.NET and C# did a usergroup tour through Florida and I was amazed at how much of their world still runs on VB6 applications. Something like 1/3 of insurance software still does. It was one of the biggest reasons that Microsoft had to keep extending support for XP. The transition from VB6 to VB.NET was a really sad one as it lost a lot of people - .net is a lot more difficult than 6 was. The result is that an entire group of people simply stopped making software and now we have businesses running on applications that are more than 20 years old that some random person in the company threw together over a week. There's a huge gulf between building a VB6 app and throwing together a web app today and despite much of the progress that has been made, we've taken some big steps back in terms of accessibility. The difference between VB.NET and C# is pretty superficial, but I sincerely hope that someday people can experience the magic that something like VB6 offered. A lot of people got their start in programming thanks to it (myself included) and it's sad that it fell by the wayside to make way for "real programming."
- wslh 10y ago
  I think we can apply basic lessons from VB6 now. 25 years later and we can't design Web UIs with the same simplicity.
- pc86 10y ago
  I am a huge fan of the Microsoft ecosystem, and I spent a great many hours developing VB.NET code at the beginning of my career. VB6 is a scourge. The fact that Joe in HR threw together an application in a weekend in a testament not to its accessibility but to its abject lack of maintainability.
  - ergothus 10y ago
    I'm not sure I understand your position. I mean, yeah, unmaintainable code sucks. But I think this highlights the need for more accessible coding. The web became huge because it was so accessible. Yes, it generated a lot of crap code, but if 10% of projects add value to society, the more projects, the more valuable projects. > The fact that Joe in HR threw together an application in a weekend in a testament not to its accessibility but to its abject lack of maintainability. I don't see how "easy/fast to create" necessitates lack of maintainability, nor that it is a statement AGAINST accessibility. (without regard to the quality of VB6)
gambiting 10y ago
I've actually learned programming when I was 12 with Visual Basic! I had a little book called "programming for kids" and it had a trial version of VB6 attached to it(it was fully functional, except that it couldn't export exes). The book had chapters on how to make a calculator, a simple notepad with save/open functionality and then at the end a gem - pong game made in VB. It was amazing. Now I work as a professional game programmer in C++, but I always think fondly of VB.
latenightcoding 10y ago
VB6 was amazing as a first language. When I learned to code for the first time I was an impatient kid and I just wanted to see my programs compile and run on a nice GUI, vb6 gave me that and I wish it was still around for my younger brother to learn how to code with it.
walkingolof 10y ago
Happy b-day VB, you where the node.js of the 90's, the starting point for many successful carers.
- cm2187 10y ago
  Carers, i.e. people who take care of legacy code or careers?
- sievebrain 10y ago
  Would be nice. Sadly node.js shares many of VB's warts, whilst having few of its nicer features. I'm not the only one who looks at what the industry had in the 1990's and thinks we've gone backwards. All Microsoft had to do was build a non-crappy online update and installation system, and our whole industry could look very different. But MS failed, utterly, in fact they made it worse, and we've ended up with the web - a pale imitation of real software development, but hey, you can deploy it without being hamstrung by a dysfunctional IT department and stuff updates silently.
- rbanffy 10y ago
  I'm uncertain saying Node.js is the VB of the 2010's is a nice thing to say or not. I wrote tons of VB code but, in retrospect, I realize it was a crude tool. Efficient, in that it allowed me to build some fairly large business apps, but not really something that encouraged best practices of later eras.
protomyth 10y ago
I did a few programs in VB in the early 90's. It was pretty easy to buy components and get data out of our database. It was also quite nice for writing a program that generated lesson plans from a score on the LAP / E-LAP assessments. I admit I was amazed at the ability to buy VBX components to do so many amazing things. It was really easy to plug them into your programs and get stuff running. I did cheat a bit and use a module that made the GUI of the programs I wrote look like the NeXTSTEP screen I was using at the time.
cordite 10y ago
Still use VB6 at work. It says "Valued Microsoft Customer" since they supposedly don't want to run the licensing servers anymore.
- latenightcoding 10y ago
  if you don't mind me asking, how big is the company and what do you do with vb6?
  - cordite 10y ago
    Developers? Over a thousand. There is a migration, though slow, from VB6 to ASP.NET C# stuff. We use VB6 because of the component-like nature of how it can integrate with other parts of a larger application--and it usually doesn't have catastrophic failure (like a segfault) which can be contained. Another aspect of why it is used is because of the low-memory requirements, which by extension means one server can host more application sessions for more users. (It is easier to upgrade one server's software instance than thousands of individual workstations)
    - barking 10y ago
      It's such a pity that microsoft did not provide a path forward for the applications written in vb6. Further, at a time when they are open-sourcing so much they still keep vb6 closed source so that no-one else can either. It's almost sadistic.
      - cm2187 10y ago
        I have some sympathy for Microsoft on this. Some of the changes could have been backward compatible (like making "set" optional). But some breaking changes had to be made. Like making all function parameters byval by default. Having everything byref by default in VB6 was just a bad initial design.
        barking 10y ago
cm2187 10y ago
I find it quite interesting that 90% of the comments here associate VB to VB6. It's a bit like if 90% of the comments on the anniversary of python would be about python 2 and how people missed it (or not)...
- umanwizard 10y ago
  That's because VB.net isn't VB; it's C# with a different lexical syntax.
  - cm2187 10y ago
    It has kept some of its niceties. It's one of the rare case insensitive languages (less pointless bugs as a result of typos), it is very expressive (I just don't get the love of certain programmers for special characters), and it provides a natural evolution for business people into programming, many of who even today have learned the basics of coding with VBA (like me...). And there aren't that many breaking changes between VB6 and VB.net. Enough to make a VB6 program not compile. But not enough to really stand in a way of a VB6 programmer upgrading his skills over a couple of weeks.
    - wvenable 10y ago
      > And there aren't that many breaking changes between VB6 and VB.net. If you just count syntax, maybe. But the entire environment and API of VB6 wasn't there, making the transition pointless. It's like arguing that Windows C programmers have an easy transition to C on Linux because it's the same language. VB.Net in it's current form should never have existed. VB.Net should have been able to run VB6 applications unmodified giving a straight forward transition from VB/VBA to .Net. Instead most apps were never ported from VB6 and VBA. It was a huge missed opportunity.
      - voltagex_ 10y ago
        Oooh, I wonder how hard it would be to make a VB6 compiler with Roslyn...
nedsma 10y ago
I quit programming VB 12 years ago after using it for two years. I still vividly remember its syntax, patterns, forms, adodb/dao stuff. It's as if I never stopped coding in it. I've been into many languages since, ending lately with Golang. Nothing felt so easy and accessible as VB. Happy 25th birthday, dear Visual Basic.
- dragonbonheur 10y ago
  Try GAMBAS on Linux or AutoIt on Windows.
  - nedsma 10y ago
    Thanks for the kind reminder. At the same time when the VB was a popular tool, I looked for similar platforms on Linux. Gambas provided very familiar, if not identical syntax, however its Forms editor wasn't as nearly as powerful as VB's. Anyway, I'm glad to hear that Gambas is still around, will certainly play with it.
everydaypanos 10y ago
I loved VB.NET especially LINQ :) The syntax kind of made more sense than C# for me
r3bl 10y ago
I had the most amazing experience learning how to program in VB6. It is, to this day, still the most amazing experience of creating desktop applications I ever had. Partially because I had a really awesome high school professor at that time, but still... In my final year of high school, I decided on my own to try using the latest .NET version of Visual Basic for my graduation project. It wasn't hard, it was just a little bit more complicated and a bit disappointing experience when compared to VB6. My project was working, but not perfectly. I felt like I could ace it in VB6, but it felt way too outdated to be usable in the long run (turns out I was right, Microsoft killed XP, my high school switched to Office 365 and Windows 7, therefore, my VB6 project would be unusable now by the school administration). I still feel the nostalgia whenever I think about how easy was to program in that thing.
TazeTSchnitzel 10y ago
I wonder if some day Microsoft will stop being stubborn, and make Visual Basic 7. A lot of people would be very happy.
- barking 10y ago
  A lot of the people have moved on from vb and also as vb6 applications have continued to work in every release of windows there is less panic about having to upgrade. However, I have heard that windows 10 is not proving quite as trouble-free as 7 and 8 were.
umanwizard 10y ago
Actually VB is dead. VB.net isn't VB any more than JavaScript is Java, and we shouldn't let Microsoft's marketing team pull the wool over our eyes by pretending there's continuity between the two. VB.net is (modulo a few unimportant exceptions) just C# transpiled to a more annoying syntax.
- codinghorror 10y ago
  I must regretfully agree with this.
wangii 10y ago
In 1996 a friend demonstrated to me how to write an calculator in VB 4.0, I was immediately hooked. it opened the GUI world to me. at that time I couldn't read English and all I could was trial-and-error. Couple of weeks later, I coded a traffic simulation and show off to another friend who studied chemistry. Guess what, the guy learnt programming and became CTO of a Chinese internet giant.
- xiaq 10y ago
  I am curious, which internet giant?
canada_dry 10y ago
Bill giving the first demo of VB 1.0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bMz2Mgs7UU0&t=2m8s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bMz2Mgs7UU0&t=2m8s
abdulhaq 10y ago
VB 1.0 was a revolution, really. I went on to buy Delphi and Paradox. Delphi was really something but the nod has to go to VB for the massive leap it took. It's not just 25 years for VB, it's 25yrs for all those GUI developers who grew up starting with VB. Now we're on Qt, JavaFX and React but as I write this I can't help but think - VB is more productive than React ;-)
jenscow 10y ago
I'm now old. VB actually got me into Windows development - coming from C & DOS, at the time the message pump was difficult for me to grasp. For LOB apps, VB1-6 was the most productive language by far.
shraken 10y ago
ByVal and ByRef forever haunt me.
bsharitt 10y ago
While HTML was the first kind of code I ever wrote, I never felt like I was doing much more than I was when I typed up something in Microsoft Works. It wasn't until I used VB when I was 13 or 14 that it hit me that I could actually make computers do what I wanted.
openasocket 10y ago
I first learned to program in VB6 when I was 14 in a high school class. I remember being so excited by programming that I flipped to the back of the book and trying to implement the advanced programming problems only a few weeks in. An explanation of Conway's Game of Life caught my eye, and I tried to implement it. Unfortunately, I hadn't yet learned about arrays or loops, so my implementation was just thousands of lines of if statements. It took me hours of copying-pasting and modifying just to get a 5x5 board working, and I remember balking when the book suggested trying to make a 50x50 or 100x100 board. It was at that point I realized all the content in the middle of the textbook might be worth looking at after all!
mathattack 10y ago
An INSANE amount of Wall Street software (that moves billions, if not trillions of dollars of money) is build on Visual Basic.
ryanmarsh 10y ago
VB was the Rails of its day. It wasn't perfect but you could make really useful apps really fast and (relatively speaking) they didn't look like shit. I guess I should say it was the Rails + Bootstrap of its day. I got a ton done with VB. It was a nice start to my career. I'm grateful for it.
carlesfe 10y ago
Nowadays it's almost a meme to hate on VB, but I wrote my first desktop application with VB6 when I was in high school, circa 2000. I knew Basic and a bit of Pascal, but the GUI builder of VB captivated me. It was so easy to create things with it! I quickly embraced it and developed many applications, among which a Scalextric car controller (attached to the voltage of a real car) and a math tutor for kids which got me a grant on my first year of college. It was pretty crappy but I still hold VB6 in my heart :)
forgotAgain 10y ago
Still the same clueless Microsoft PR: picking at scaled over wounds. Well I guess we're all just grandpappies so WGAF.
zanethomas 10y ago
The original Visual Basic was revolutionary. As a long time c programmer, at the time, I saw the custom control market opportunity and jumped in as co-founder of Mabry Software. Life was good, until vb.net. I also wrote a bit, for example: http://www.amazon.com/Visual-Basic-How--Definitive-Problem/dp/1878739425/ref=sr_1_7?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1464042684&sr=1-7&refinements=p_27%3AZane+Thomas http://www.amazon.com/Visual-Basic-How--Definitive-Problem/d...
- zanethomas 10y ago
  and: http://www.amazon.com/Visual-Basic-4-0-How-Problem-Solver/dp/1571690018 http://www.amazon.com/Visual-Basic-4-0-How-Problem-Solver/dp...
tn13 10y ago
VB6 was magic during those days. VB6 played a great role in making computers useful to small businesses and widespread adoption of computers. It also reduced the cost of software development.
mkhpalm 10y ago
Its interesting how much hatred there is for visual basic these days. I understand, its the bane of my existence right now replacing thousands of things written with it. But I never stop being amazed at how successful it was. People who had no business programming were able to get stuff done with it. Imagine if MS didn't corner itself and ultimately kill the language by implementing only for windows?
- AnimalMuppet 10y ago
  > People who had no business programming were able to get stuff done with it. True, and that was good. But it became bad when businesses made that "stuff" part of business-critical processes.
  - ern 10y ago
    This was often an argument I read in my Systems Analysis textbooks back in that era: "Bob from Accounting threw together this app, now we need to replace it with a staged CMMI-compliant development process that does things properly". IRL: it resulted in an expensive and late waterfall project that Bob, and the rest of his department hate. I'm sure that the code quality was atrocious, but in many ways, it is the ultimate Agile goal: Bob is solving his own problems, cutting through red tape, and addressing real business needs. It's a pity that the idea was abandoned, instead of finding ways to reduce the ways Bob could shoot himself in the foot.
ern 10y ago
I started work at the tail-end of the VB6 (legacy systems were maintained with VB6, new work was done in .NET). We lost a lot of good people in the transition. Unfortunately, many modern developers (including me) avoid VB, in all its incarnations, and there is a fair amount of technical snobbery in the dev world (there always was-even in the VB6 world). The RAD tools currently on the market demo well, but don't seem to lend themselves to more complex use-cases. In the absence of good evidence to the contrary, draggy-droppy RAD is looked down upon, in favor of markup based approaches, and inappropriate complexity is worn as a badge of honor (gross generalization, but I think valid for a substantial chunk of the business development world). An Agile development process, coupled with a solid RAD platform should yield interesting results.
ak39 10y ago
On Error Resume Next That feature alone was the reason for its strength. And its danger.
zaighumrajput 10y ago
I work at an investment bank and I have daily contact with VB. It's awful and I wish it had some modern features like try catch blocks, but to automate simple tasks in Excel or Outlook it seems to be the only option. Though powershell shows promise it doesn't run inside the Excel runtime and its a pain convincing others to use it.
farcical_tinpot 10y ago
I look back on Visual Basic with a mixture of trepidation and fondness. If you were a programmer who had experience of building well structured applications in C++, Python etc. then you could get a lot of stuff done and built on Windows. If you inherited a bad application, however....it was really bad. You can't deny its importance to desktop applications though. The switch to VB.Net was the first time that you couldn't simply take your existing code and recompile it in a new version and carry on adding new features. That's where VB.Net, and .Net in general, simply didn't take off. Most people found out they simply didn't need or even want the complexity of full object oriented development either. What Microsoft should have done was built a rapid development environment on top of .Net, distinct from programming in C#, that allowed you to take classic VB code and simply recompile it. The switch to .Net has never really happened for Microsoft and if anyone has been rewriting applications they are as web applications or mobile apps - which Microsoft are not a part of. It will be seen as a pivotal moment where Microsoft simply lost developers. You see it now with pandering to bringing Bash to Windows, amongst other things. No one cares about Windows development.
digi_owl 10y ago
I think the major benefit of VB was that they put the UI stuff front and center. This in that you first placed the button, and then wrote the code "inside" that button. Most dev tools seems to treat the UI thing as something you do in a parallel track to the code, or create via code.

184 points by mikerg87 10y ago

IIRC Microsoft killed Visual Basic with the introduction of VB.Net back around 2000. Why are they celebrating its birthday?

giancarlostoro 10y ago
I honestly wished they would of somehow open sourced Visual Basic 6, it was quite interesting being able to create software rapidly and easily that couldn't be "decompiled" the way .NET / Java applications can be reversed back from bytecode. Unlike Delphi / Pascal which are a bit harder to just pick up and learn by comparison (try just giving a child Delphi, and then give them VB6 and see which one they could work quicker in). I think VB.NET had not much of a point with a language like C# around. Maybe they should of redone some parts of Visual Basic .NET to make it more adaptable by all programmers. Multi-line comments is one thing I wished it had.
- jarcane 10y ago
  There is Gambas, which while not a clone in the way FreeBASIC is of QuickBASIC, is at least intended to provide a similar experience. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gambas https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gambas
- lazarus101 10y ago
  At that time open source was "cancer" to Microsoft
ZanyProgrammer 10y ago
Because it brings out the nostalgia for people. Also a way to signal how long you've been programming, or that you stared programming early on in life.
bdcravens 10y ago
VBA is still shipping in Office 2016
- cm2187 10y ago
  Pressing ALT-F11 in Office 2016 is quite depressing. They haven't spent even a minute improving anything in 15 years. It's quite shocking for a functionality which is so critical to so many people and companies.
- therealmarv 10y ago
  VBA is the reason Visual Basic will never die gracefully.
  - cm2187 10y ago
    And microsoft is pushing for people to use javascript instead. If you think that VBA code written by novice programmers looks bad, I think you should look at javascript written by novice programmers. A guy was trying to draw a line and decided to do it pixel by pixel by adding "div" of 1px by 1px to the DOM, and each pixel was added with a callback!
WorldMaker 10y ago
To Microsoft, VB.NET is still Visual Basic. They didn't kill VB, they made a new version that was different. The VB.NET compiler version numbers even start from 7 as it was/is considered the successor.

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]

russnewcomer 10y ago

I have a lot of fond memories of VB6, as I started using it for an internship in college, when then I got hired full-time after graduation to keep up the app, as the sole developer/IT professional at the company. VB6 had its flaws, certainly, but as a 21 year old kid figuring out how to architect a software system, get projects done, and get the system working on the existing Novell Netware infrastructure, I didn't need to fight with C++ or deal with the vagaries of Delphi. VB6 was a great tool, VB.NET became a different tool, and I wish for the sake of not-really-programmers everywhere, VB7 had existed.

giancarlostoro 10y ago

In a few more days I'll be 26. I started programming with Visual Basic 6, since then I have moved on. From time to time though, I can't help but try it out again now and then. I've seen many programmers start out with it and move on through the field into other languages. Many interesting projects have been made in Visual Basic 6 alone. Everything from private server software, to game cheating tools (packet injections), online rpg game engines, and so on and so forth (and throw in malware in there somewhere too). I am grateful for Visual Basic despite having moved from it, I know many despised it, and some of that group once coded in it, but I have to appreciate my roots despite the good or the bad I still learned programming through VB6. Thank you to whoever has ever worked on Visual Basic 6. Happy belated birthday as well.

khedoros 10y ago
I'm 5 years older. I started in Qbasic and moved to VB4 or 5 pretty soon after that. I've left them behind, but I've got a similar feeling about those languages. These days, I guess I'd do some TK thing in Python if I was going for speed of development, but that seems a few steps backwards from what I could do (almost) 20 years, in a few ways.

ibdknox 10y ago

Despite much of the hate VB has gotten over the years, it served an insanely important purpose in the rise of internal business software. When I was at MSFT, me and the PM who owned the compilers for VB.NET and C# did a usergroup tour through Florida and I was amazed at how much of their world still runs on VB6 applications. Something like 1/3 of insurance software still does. It was one of the biggest reasons that Microsoft had to keep extending support for XP. The transition from VB6 to VB.NET was a really sad one as it lost a lot of people - .net is a lot more difficult than 6 was. The result is that an entire group of people simply stopped making software and now we have businesses running on applications that are more than 20 years old that some random person in the company threw together over a week. There's a huge gulf between building a VB6 app and throwing together a web app today and despite much of the progress that has been made, we've taken some big steps back in terms of accessibility. The difference between VB.NET and C# is pretty superficial, but I sincerely hope that someday people can experience the magic that something like VB6 offered. A lot of people got their start in programming thanks to it (myself included) and it's sad that it fell by the wayside to make way for "real programming."

wslh 10y ago
I think we can apply basic lessons from VB6 now. 25 years later and we can't design Web UIs with the same simplicity.
pc86 10y ago
I am a huge fan of the Microsoft ecosystem, and I spent a great many hours developing VB.NET code at the beginning of my career. VB6 is a scourge. The fact that Joe in HR threw together an application in a weekend in a testament not to its accessibility but to its abject lack of maintainability.
- ergothus 10y ago
  I'm not sure I understand your position. I mean, yeah, unmaintainable code sucks. But I think this highlights the need for more accessible coding. The web became huge because it was so accessible. Yes, it generated a lot of crap code, but if 10% of projects add value to society, the more projects, the more valuable projects. > The fact that Joe in HR threw together an application in a weekend in a testament not to its accessibility but to its abject lack of maintainability. I don't see how "easy/fast to create" necessitates lack of maintainability, nor that it is a statement AGAINST accessibility. (without regard to the quality of VB6)

gambiting 10y ago

I've actually learned programming when I was 12 with Visual Basic! I had a little book called "programming for kids" and it had a trial version of VB6 attached to it(it was fully functional, except that it couldn't export exes). The book had chapters on how to make a calculator, a simple notepad with save/open functionality and then at the end a gem - pong game made in VB. It was amazing. Now I work as a professional game programmer in C++, but I always think fondly of VB.

latenightcoding 10y ago

VB6 was amazing as a first language. When I learned to code for the first time I was an impatient kid and I just wanted to see my programs compile and run on a nice GUI, vb6 gave me that and I wish it was still around for my younger brother to learn how to code with it.

walkingolof 10y ago

Happy b-day VB, you where the node.js of the 90's, the starting point for many successful carers.

cm2187 10y ago
Carers, i.e. people who take care of legacy code or careers?
sievebrain 10y ago
Would be nice. Sadly node.js shares many of VB's warts, whilst having few of its nicer features. I'm not the only one who looks at what the industry had in the 1990's and thinks we've gone backwards. All Microsoft had to do was build a non-crappy online update and installation system, and our whole industry could look very different. But MS failed, utterly, in fact they made it worse, and we've ended up with the web - a pale imitation of real software development, but hey, you can deploy it without being hamstrung by a dysfunctional IT department and stuff updates silently.
rbanffy 10y ago
I'm uncertain saying Node.js is the VB of the 2010's is a nice thing to say or not. I wrote tons of VB code but, in retrospect, I realize it was a crude tool. Efficient, in that it allowed me to build some fairly large business apps, but not really something that encouraged best practices of later eras.

protomyth 10y ago

I did a few programs in VB in the early 90's. It was pretty easy to buy components and get data out of our database. It was also quite nice for writing a program that generated lesson plans from a score on the LAP / E-LAP assessments. I admit I was amazed at the ability to buy VBX components to do so many amazing things. It was really easy to plug them into your programs and get stuff running. I did cheat a bit and use a module that made the GUI of the programs I wrote look like the NeXTSTEP screen I was using at the time.

cordite 10y ago

Still use VB6 at work. It says "Valued Microsoft Customer" since they supposedly don't want to run the licensing servers anymore.

latenightcoding 10y ago
if you don't mind me asking, how big is the company and what do you do with vb6?
- cordite 10y ago
  Developers? Over a thousand. There is a migration, though slow, from VB6 to ASP.NET C# stuff. We use VB6 because of the component-like nature of how it can integrate with other parts of a larger application--and it usually doesn't have catastrophic failure (like a segfault) which can be contained. Another aspect of why it is used is because of the low-memory requirements, which by extension means one server can host more application sessions for more users. (It is easier to upgrade one server's software instance than thousands of individual workstations)
  - barking 10y ago
    It's such a pity that microsoft did not provide a path forward for the applications written in vb6. Further, at a time when they are open-sourcing so much they still keep vb6 closed source so that no-one else can either. It's almost sadistic.
    - cm2187 10y ago
      I have some sympathy for Microsoft on this. Some of the changes could have been backward compatible (like making "set" optional). But some breaking changes had to be made. Like making all function parameters byval by default. Having everything byref by default in VB6 was just a bad initial design.
      - barking 10y ago

cm2187 10y ago

I find it quite interesting that 90% of the comments here associate VB to VB6. It's a bit like if 90% of the comments on the anniversary of python would be about python 2 and how people missed it (or not)...

umanwizard 10y ago
That's because VB.net isn't VB; it's C# with a different lexical syntax.
- cm2187 10y ago
  It has kept some of its niceties. It's one of the rare case insensitive languages (less pointless bugs as a result of typos), it is very expressive (I just don't get the love of certain programmers for special characters), and it provides a natural evolution for business people into programming, many of who even today have learned the basics of coding with VBA (like me...). And there aren't that many breaking changes between VB6 and VB.net. Enough to make a VB6 program not compile. But not enough to really stand in a way of a VB6 programmer upgrading his skills over a couple of weeks.
  - wvenable 10y ago
    > And there aren't that many breaking changes between VB6 and VB.net. If you just count syntax, maybe. But the entire environment and API of VB6 wasn't there, making the transition pointless. It's like arguing that Windows C programmers have an easy transition to C on Linux because it's the same language. VB.Net in it's current form should never have existed. VB.Net should have been able to run VB6 applications unmodified giving a straight forward transition from VB/VBA to .Net. Instead most apps were never ported from VB6 and VBA. It was a huge missed opportunity.
    - voltagex_ 10y ago
      Oooh, I wonder how hard it would be to make a VB6 compiler with Roslyn...

nedsma 10y ago

I quit programming VB 12 years ago after using it for two years. I still vividly remember its syntax, patterns, forms, adodb/dao stuff. It's as if I never stopped coding in it. I've been into many languages since, ending lately with Golang. Nothing felt so easy and accessible as VB. Happy 25th birthday, dear Visual Basic.

dragonbonheur 10y ago
Try GAMBAS on Linux or AutoIt on Windows.
- nedsma 10y ago
  Thanks for the kind reminder. At the same time when the VB was a popular tool, I looked for similar platforms on Linux. Gambas provided very familiar, if not identical syntax, however its Forms editor wasn't as nearly as powerful as VB's. Anyway, I'm glad to hear that Gambas is still around, will certainly play with it.

everydaypanos 10y ago

I loved VB.NET especially LINQ :) The syntax kind of made more sense than C# for me

r3bl 10y ago

I had the most amazing experience learning how to program in VB6. It is, to this day, still the most amazing experience of creating desktop applications I ever had. Partially because I had a really awesome high school professor at that time, but still... In my final year of high school, I decided on my own to try using the latest .NET version of Visual Basic for my graduation project. It wasn't hard, it was just a little bit more complicated and a bit disappointing experience when compared to VB6. My project was working, but not perfectly. I felt like I could ace it in VB6, but it felt way too outdated to be usable in the long run (turns out I was right, Microsoft killed XP, my high school switched to Office 365 and Windows 7, therefore, my VB6 project would be unusable now by the school administration). I still feel the nostalgia whenever I think about how easy was to program in that thing.

TazeTSchnitzel 10y ago

I wonder if some day Microsoft will stop being stubborn, and make Visual Basic 7. A lot of people would be very happy.

barking 10y ago
A lot of the people have moved on from vb and also as vb6 applications have continued to work in every release of windows there is less panic about having to upgrade. However, I have heard that windows 10 is not proving quite as trouble-free as 7 and 8 were.

umanwizard 10y ago

Actually VB is dead. VB.net isn't VB any more than JavaScript is Java, and we shouldn't let Microsoft's marketing team pull the wool over our eyes by pretending there's continuity between the two. VB.net is (modulo a few unimportant exceptions) just C# transpiled to a more annoying syntax.

codinghorror 10y ago
I must regretfully agree with this.

wangii 10y ago

In 1996 a friend demonstrated to me how to write an calculator in VB 4.0, I was immediately hooked. it opened the GUI world to me. at that time I couldn't read English and all I could was trial-and-error. Couple of weeks later, I coded a traffic simulation and show off to another friend who studied chemistry. Guess what, the guy learnt programming and became CTO of a Chinese internet giant.

xiaq 10y ago
I am curious, which internet giant?

canada_dry 10y ago

Bill giving the first demo of VB 1.0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bMz2Mgs7UU0&t=2m8s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bMz2Mgs7UU0&t=2m8s

abdulhaq 10y ago

VB 1.0 was a revolution, really. I went on to buy Delphi and Paradox. Delphi was really something but the nod has to go to VB for the massive leap it took. It's not just 25 years for VB, it's 25yrs for all those GUI developers who grew up starting with VB. Now we're on Qt, JavaFX and React but as I write this I can't help but think - VB is more productive than React ;-)

jenscow 10y ago

I'm now old. VB actually got me into Windows development - coming from C & DOS, at the time the message pump was difficult for me to grasp. For LOB apps, VB1-6 was the most productive language by far.

shraken 10y ago

ByVal and ByRef forever haunt me.

bsharitt 10y ago

While HTML was the first kind of code I ever wrote, I never felt like I was doing much more than I was when I typed up something in Microsoft Works. It wasn't until I used VB when I was 13 or 14 that it hit me that I could actually make computers do what I wanted.

openasocket 10y ago

I first learned to program in VB6 when I was 14 in a high school class. I remember being so excited by programming that I flipped to the back of the book and trying to implement the advanced programming problems only a few weeks in. An explanation of Conway's Game of Life caught my eye, and I tried to implement it. Unfortunately, I hadn't yet learned about arrays or loops, so my implementation was just thousands of lines of if statements. It took me hours of copying-pasting and modifying just to get a 5x5 board working, and I remember balking when the book suggested trying to make a 50x50 or 100x100 board. It was at that point I realized all the content in the middle of the textbook might be worth looking at after all!

mathattack 10y ago

An INSANE amount of Wall Street software (that moves billions, if not trillions of dollars of money) is build on Visual Basic.

ryanmarsh 10y ago

VB was the Rails of its day. It wasn't perfect but you could make really useful apps really fast and (relatively speaking) they didn't look like shit. I guess I should say it was the Rails + Bootstrap of its day. I got a ton done with VB. It was a nice start to my career. I'm grateful for it.

carlesfe 10y ago

Nowadays it's almost a meme to hate on VB, but I wrote my first desktop application with VB6 when I was in high school, circa 2000. I knew Basic and a bit of Pascal, but the GUI builder of VB captivated me. It was so easy to create things with it! I quickly embraced it and developed many applications, among which a Scalextric car controller (attached to the voltage of a real car) and a math tutor for kids which got me a grant on my first year of college. It was pretty crappy but I still hold VB6 in my heart :)

forgotAgain 10y ago

Still the same clueless Microsoft PR: picking at scaled over wounds. Well I guess we're all just grandpappies so WGAF.

zanethomas 10y ago

The original Visual Basic was revolutionary. As a long time c programmer, at the time, I saw the custom control market opportunity and jumped in as co-founder of Mabry Software. Life was good, until vb.net. I also wrote a bit, for example: http://www.amazon.com/Visual-Basic-How--Definitive-Problem/dp/1878739425/ref=sr_1_7?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1464042684&sr=1-7&refinements=p_27%3AZane+Thomas http://www.amazon.com/Visual-Basic-How--Definitive-Problem/d...

zanethomas 10y ago
and: http://www.amazon.com/Visual-Basic-4-0-How-Problem-Solver/dp/1571690018 http://www.amazon.com/Visual-Basic-4-0-How-Problem-Solver/dp...

tn13 10y ago

VB6 was magic during those days. VB6 played a great role in making computers useful to small businesses and widespread adoption of computers. It also reduced the cost of software development.

mkhpalm 10y ago

Its interesting how much hatred there is for visual basic these days. I understand, its the bane of my existence right now replacing thousands of things written with it. But I never stop being amazed at how successful it was. People who had no business programming were able to get stuff done with it. Imagine if MS didn't corner itself and ultimately kill the language by implementing only for windows?

AnimalMuppet 10y ago
> People who had no business programming were able to get stuff done with it. True, and that was good. But it became bad when businesses made that "stuff" part of business-critical processes.
- ern 10y ago
  This was often an argument I read in my Systems Analysis textbooks back in that era: "Bob from Accounting threw together this app, now we need to replace it with a staged CMMI-compliant development process that does things properly". IRL: it resulted in an expensive and late waterfall project that Bob, and the rest of his department hate. I'm sure that the code quality was atrocious, but in many ways, it is the ultimate Agile goal: Bob is solving his own problems, cutting through red tape, and addressing real business needs. It's a pity that the idea was abandoned, instead of finding ways to reduce the ways Bob could shoot himself in the foot.

ern 10y ago

I started work at the tail-end of the VB6 (legacy systems were maintained with VB6, new work was done in .NET). We lost a lot of good people in the transition. Unfortunately, many modern developers (including me) avoid VB, in all its incarnations, and there is a fair amount of technical snobbery in the dev world (there always was-even in the VB6 world). The RAD tools currently on the market demo well, but don't seem to lend themselves to more complex use-cases. In the absence of good evidence to the contrary, draggy-droppy RAD is looked down upon, in favor of markup based approaches, and inappropriate complexity is worn as a badge of honor (gross generalization, but I think valid for a substantial chunk of the business development world). An Agile development process, coupled with a solid RAD platform should yield interesting results.

ak39 10y ago

On Error Resume Next That feature alone was the reason for its strength. And its danger.

zaighumrajput 10y ago

I work at an investment bank and I have daily contact with VB. It's awful and I wish it had some modern features like try catch blocks, but to automate simple tasks in Excel or Outlook it seems to be the only option. Though powershell shows promise it doesn't run inside the Excel runtime and its a pain convincing others to use it.

farcical_tinpot 10y ago

I look back on Visual Basic with a mixture of trepidation and fondness. If you were a programmer who had experience of building well structured applications in C++, Python etc. then you could get a lot of stuff done and built on Windows. If you inherited a bad application, however....it was really bad. You can't deny its importance to desktop applications though. The switch to VB.Net was the first time that you couldn't simply take your existing code and recompile it in a new version and carry on adding new features. That's where VB.Net, and .Net in general, simply didn't take off. Most people found out they simply didn't need or even want the complexity of full object oriented development either. What Microsoft should have done was built a rapid development environment on top of .Net, distinct from programming in C#, that allowed you to take classic VB code and simply recompile it. The switch to .Net has never really happened for Microsoft and if anyone has been rewriting applications they are as web applications or mobile apps - which Microsoft are not a part of. It will be seen as a pivotal moment where Microsoft simply lost developers. You see it now with pandering to bringing Bash to Windows, amongst other things. No one cares about Windows development.

digi_owl 10y ago

I think the major benefit of VB was that they put the UI stuff front and center. This in that you first placed the button, and then wrote the code "inside" that button. Most dev tools seems to treat the UI thing as something you do in a parallel track to the code, or create via code.