4 ms·
Visual Basic was basically(!) killed by Microsoft albeit large protest, so no, putting your trust in one company does not always work. PHP has been developed v
by fetbaffe 7y ago
Visual Basic was basically(!) killed by Microsoft albeit large protest, so no, putting your trust in one company does not always work.
PHP has been developed very well the past few years as community project, there is an open RFC process with a codified voting process in place. Sure there have been some drama within the community, but that has not affected either the language nor the implementation.
What makes PHP a great fit for a community driven project is that PHP is a pragmatic language in its core. If the general goal of a project is to design a perfect & consistent language then a community driven process is maybe not the best approach.
- pjmlp 7y agoVisual Basic lives on as VB.NET and to this day VB 6 runtime keeps being updated to run on the latest versions of Windows.
- fetbaffe 7y agoVB is de facto dead, declared legacy in 2008 & latest major release was in 1998. VB.NET is a new incompatible language, everyone invested in VB needed to retrain skills & rewrite existing software. It was a huge uproar in the community, but MS didn't care enough & this goes against TS idea that the community can stop a major company doing this sort of thing. It can happen & it will happen again. However that does not mean that you shouldn't invest resources in a corporate language, it just a false argument to think it can't die. Edit: changed disappear to die
- pjmlp 7y agoYet on a past life I managed to migrate code without any major issues, other than components that weren't available on .NET.
- Crinus 7y agoVisual Basic and VB.NET are two very different beasts, only sharing a name. The VB6 runtime is indeed updated to run, but really how much update does it need beyond sticking the DLLs around? The VB4 and VB5 runtimes run perfectly fine on Win10 and those had no updates for it. It all relies on Win10's overall backwards compatibility.
- pjmlp 7y agoThey are still pretty similar, Microsoft re-introduced quite a few features back.
- Crinus 7y agoThey are similar only on a superficial level, at their core they have not only vast differences in terms of how they work but they also have a different philosophy. It is not a matter of what you can do in terms of features, but also how you do it and how that affects the IDE, which is a core element of VB6 as opposed to VB.NET where you could be using whatever text editor or IDE you want (it isn't a coincidence that VB6 has its own IDE whereas VB.NET is using the same IDE as C# and C++). VB6 isn't just the language, if anything the language is a minor part of it. VB6 is the entire tool, including the language, IDE and library. You cannot separate these, they are written for each other. This is also what pretty much all VB6 alternatives get wrong as they try to reuse elements designed for something else. You cannot do that and get something like VB6 beyond at a superficial level (and this is exactly what Microsoft did with VB.NET).
- pjmlp 7y agoI used VB 3 - 5, later on did a couple of ports from VB 6 to VB.NET, and I am lost on what you actually mean.
- Crinus 7y agoDoesn't surprise me, you are not alone in this as others who have used classic VB do not really see the difference between classic VB and VB.NET and to some extent not even (most of) Microsoft seems to get what makes classic VB special :-P. However i'm not sure how i could describe it better than the last paragraph in my reply above as to me the difference between the two is day and night. It is kinda similar to not understanding how something like a jury rigged Vim with a GDB, file list manager and ctags parser differs from a real IDE even after having used the latter. Usually i'd say "you need to experience the real thing" but if you do not get it after you do, then i'm at a loss of words.
- 72deluxe 7y agoLet's hope we get some form of generics because in my recent use of it, I can see the usefulness of type information for parameters and return types but not the complete inability to say that this function will return an array of a certain type; I can only say that it'll return an array (which might have anything and everything in it), which is useless.
- peteri 7y agoIt still lives on fine, turn on the developer tab in Excel and there is VBA 7.1 (which is basically still VB6 with a different forms engine)