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To me, this shows the huge risk of building on a language/platform that depends on a single company. This even happened earlier. Visual Basic .NET is grossly i

To me, this shows the huge risk of building on a language/platform that depends on a single company. This even happened earlier. Visual Basic .NET is grossly incompatible with Visual Basic 6, so much so that Visual Basic .NET is essentially a different language and was derisively called Visual Fred http://catb.org/~esr/jargon/html/V/Visual-Fred.html http://catb.org/~esr/jargon/html/V/Visual-Fred.html ... Of course, it was possible to rewrite software so that would work with Visual Basic .NET, but that completely misses the point. Most people in The Real World have better things to do than rewrite working software just to keep it working. Most of us want to solve new problems, not re-solve the same problem again. Those who chose to use Visual Basic for non-trivial software got the shaft twice, including the transition from vb6. But don't worry, I suspect in a few years many people will forget about the risks of tying yourself to a single company and will get the shaft again. History so often repeats itself because people don't learn from history. I wonder how many people will actually learn from this. Maybe the community of software Ddvelopers will learn from this. But I fear it will just happen again. If someone could prove me wrong that would be great. :-)

jeswin 7y ago
As an ex-VB6 programmer, my view is that Microsoft has been fairly supportive of VB users. - The IDE itself was supported for 10 years, till 2008 - The runtime is supported till 2024, which is like 26 years. I think you can get it to work on Windows 10 as well, though I haven't tried it myself. I still see people using VB apps. My view is that VB.Net should never have been created, since it was closer to C# than it was to VB. Neither should it have been adopted by VB programmers (if they did a fair analysis), but Microsoft messaging around that time may have suggested it's a workable path forward.
- roenxi 7y ago
  The typical working career is 40 years. If 10-26 years is considered an acceptable lifetime for a language all your experience in the languages you use will be forcibly reset fairly early in your career. It isn't going to be major in itself, but becoming known for being a specialist in a corporate sponsored language is a pretty catastrophic career error. Anyone who learned C on the other hand looks pretty clever.
  - hu3 7y ago
    I wouldn't use C as comparison. C's ubiquity and durability is not the norm for programming languages. It's an exception.
  - kungito 7y ago
    To be honest it sounds pretty not clever knowing only 1 language and having your career depend on it
- gus_massa 7y ago
  It works in Windows 10. It's a problem to install because VB6 expect a very old version of Java and the 16 bit installer doesn't work in the 64 bit Window. But after a few trick, it still works.
- cm2187 7y ago
  On the other side the reason VB.net broke backward compatibility was to correct things that were obviously bad design decisions in VB6. Like parameters being byref by default, having to use the Set keyword for objects, inconsistent 0 or 1 based collection structures, etc. If VB was meant to survive and move the XXI century, these things had to be fixed.
  - orthoxerox 7y ago
    VB.NET half-broke the compatibility, which got it stuck in the weird space where automatic translation from VB6 was no longer possible, but VB still had lots of quirks that made it harder to coevolve it with C#.
- int_19h 7y ago
  The VB6 runtime ships with Win10, in fact.
jrs95 7y ago
It's not like they're going to break VB.NET or drop support anytime soon. Existing software will keep working. At this point there's no real point in continuing to add to it -- new stuff should be written in C#. It's better.
tannhaeuser 7y ago
Totally agree. I'm always confused why people eg buy in to TypeScript, when for me the entire point of using JavaScript is its portability and ubiquity. If you're willing to accept a build/compilation step, then there are much, much better languages out there IMO, rather than slowly shoehorning weakly-typed languages to become "more like Java", and creating guaranteed portability and lock-in issues along the way. I never understood why F/OSS didn't kick in to provide a portable runtime for VB or classic BASIC. There is/was something like GWA Basic, wasn't there? At least I'm not aware of a formal language spec for (classic) BASIC from the likes of ISO.
- pjmlp 7y ago
  There are several VB-like FOSS clones, Gambas being the most well known.
- miffy900 7y ago
  > I'm always confused why people eg buy in to TypeScript, when for me the entire point of using JavaScript is its portability and ubiquity Javascript's ubiquity and portability does not change the fact that on its own, it is a pretty bad programming language. There are a plethora of reasons to choose Typescript, most prominently is the much much better development experience Typescript give you. I'm not sure if you've used Typescript, but using Typescript still gives you the portability and ubiquity of javascript because all it does is compile down to Javascript.

jeswin 7y ago

As an ex-VB6 programmer, my view is that Microsoft has been fairly supportive of VB users. - The IDE itself was supported for 10 years, till 2008 - The runtime is supported till 2024, which is like 26 years. I think you can get it to work on Windows 10 as well, though I haven't tried it myself. I still see people using VB apps. My view is that VB.Net should never have been created, since it was closer to C# than it was to VB. Neither should it have been adopted by VB programmers (if they did a fair analysis), but Microsoft messaging around that time may have suggested it's a workable path forward.

roenxi 7y ago
The typical working career is 40 years. If 10-26 years is considered an acceptable lifetime for a language all your experience in the languages you use will be forcibly reset fairly early in your career. It isn't going to be major in itself, but becoming known for being a specialist in a corporate sponsored language is a pretty catastrophic career error. Anyone who learned C on the other hand looks pretty clever.
- hu3 7y ago
  I wouldn't use C as comparison. C's ubiquity and durability is not the norm for programming languages. It's an exception.
- kungito 7y ago
  To be honest it sounds pretty not clever knowing only 1 language and having your career depend on it
gus_massa 7y ago
It works in Windows 10. It's a problem to install because VB6 expect a very old version of Java and the 16 bit installer doesn't work in the 64 bit Window. But after a few trick, it still works.
cm2187 7y ago
On the other side the reason VB.net broke backward compatibility was to correct things that were obviously bad design decisions in VB6. Like parameters being byref by default, having to use the Set keyword for objects, inconsistent 0 or 1 based collection structures, etc. If VB was meant to survive and move the XXI century, these things had to be fixed.
- orthoxerox 7y ago
  VB.NET half-broke the compatibility, which got it stuck in the weird space where automatic translation from VB6 was no longer possible, but VB still had lots of quirks that made it harder to coevolve it with C#.
int_19h 7y ago
The VB6 runtime ships with Win10, in fact.

jrs95 7y ago

It's not like they're going to break VB.NET or drop support anytime soon. Existing software will keep working. At this point there's no real point in continuing to add to it -- new stuff should be written in C#. It's better.

tannhaeuser 7y ago

Totally agree. I'm always confused why people eg buy in to TypeScript, when for me the entire point of using JavaScript is its portability and ubiquity. If you're willing to accept a build/compilation step, then there are much, much better languages out there IMO, rather than slowly shoehorning weakly-typed languages to become "more like Java", and creating guaranteed portability and lock-in issues along the way. I never understood why F/OSS didn't kick in to provide a portable runtime for VB or classic BASIC. There is/was something like GWA Basic, wasn't there? At least I'm not aware of a formal language spec for (classic) BASIC from the likes of ISO.

pjmlp 7y ago
There are several VB-like FOSS clones, Gambas being the most well known.
miffy900 7y ago
> I'm always confused why people eg buy in to TypeScript, when for me the entire point of using JavaScript is its portability and ubiquity Javascript's ubiquity and portability does not change the fact that on its own, it is a pretty bad programming language. There are a plethora of reasons to choose Typescript, most prominently is the much much better development experience Typescript give you. I'm not sure if you've used Typescript, but using Typescript still gives you the portability and ubiquity of javascript because all it does is compile down to Javascript.