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In the late 90's I used to sit next to a team of about 20 VB developers. When MS decided to make VB obsolete, those folks had to re-learn software development

In the late 90's I used to sit next to a team of about 20 VB developers. When MS decided to make VB obsolete, those folks had to re-learn software development and were getting intern like opportunities because suddenly all that VB knowledge and experience was worth exactly zero. Hopefully y'all fare better when they decide to nuke C# and .NET.

deleted 4y ago
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fexecve 4y ago
I was there in those days too. VB was a very beginner-friendly language, more akin to what we call today "low-code" than other languages. Those developers didn't have to "re" learn software development, as you think, instead they probably never knew software development well enough to use languages like VB.NET (which is what all of the VB devs I worked with ended up on). "C# and .NET" is equal to any language you can think of in terms of complexity, so C# devs are going to be just fine.
tclancy 4y ago
I'm not totally sure what that means. VB and the change to .NET are kind of a one-off event. A "VB developer" could mean anything from someone writing VB/ ASP in a text editor with minimal syntax highlighting to someone using a drag and drop editor and never writing code to someone who was really just writing fancy Excel macros. If you want to suggest some of the people working in a GUI only had trouble making the transition, I suppose it's possible, but .NET offered VB.net and VisualStudio still had drag-and-drop editors. So why would they need to be interns? Because people started organizing code differently in folders and linking DLLs?
- stcroixx 4y ago
  At the height of VB6 usage, there was no VB.net or Visual Studio. There was the VB6 windows binary that was a GUI form builder and IDE. ASP was brand new and for web development, so there was not much overlap in the dev community. I don't think it was even possible to write VB code in a simple text editor and compile that without the VB IDE. Cold Fusion and Power Builder were similarly corporate controlled and suffered the same fate. A C programmer during the same time period saw almost no changes to their language or job opportunities.
brushfoot 4y ago
> all that VB knowledge and experience was worth exactly zero Except that didn't happen at all. Visual Basic still exists. From Microsoft (2020): > One of the major benefits of using Visual Basic is that the language has been stable for a very long time. (Source: Microsoft, on Visual Basic support in .NET 5: https://devblogs.microsoft.com/vbteam/visual-basic-support-planned-for-net-5-0/ https://devblogs.microsoft.com/vbteam/visual-basic-support-p...) As of January 2023, the latest version of Visual Studio (2022) still offers to scaffold me a new Visual Basic project! And VB exists in other forms, too. The other day, I was coding VBA macros for an Excel spreadsheet for my business. Worked great and saved me a bunch of time.
- bitwize 4y ago
  VB.NET has only superficial similarities to VB 6 and before. Microsoft discontinued the original VB in favor of VB.NET, but the engine lives on in VBA and Microsoft has used VB6 to build various internal things (I think some of the UI to Windows Defender is VB6). But for most "Microsoft shops", VB6 was a dead end, and that left a lot of VB developers out in the cold. They had to reskill with the .NET stuff (significant, especially in the early 2000s), or starve.
  - mschuster91 4y ago
    > I think some of the UI to Windows Defender is VB6 ... What?! Amazing they still have running tooling to build it, and I don't even want to know what bad surprises hide in the redistributable runtime.
  - brushfoot 4y ago
    > VB.NET has only superficial similarities to VB 6 and before. There are differences, but the similarities are more than superficial. Some of my first apps were in 6, and then I transitioned to VB.NET in the early 2000s. At the very least, it pretty familiar and intuitive. Even VBA is pretty similar to the VB.NET apps I developed in terms of OOP, syntax, autocompletion in the editor, event handlers, and so on. Again, there are definitely differences, but there was no "[relearning] software development and getting intern like opportunities" like the comment I was replying to said, and my knowledge and experience was definitely not "worth exactly zero." It was just an evolution.
valdiorn 4y ago
If they had to relearn their craft because they changed tools, they weren't very skilled to start with. You've drawn the wrong conclusion here. And yes, I hopped off the .net train after 15 years of using c# and took a job writing python, and some JavaScript. I had done JavaScript before, using jQuery. Now I had to learn react. And they used MongiDB as the primary data platform. I had spent the last decade working with SQL. And it was fine, because my skill isn't tied to a single tool.
- arka2147483647 4y ago
  This is really naive about how much of effective programming is about knowing the frameworks, libraries, corner cases, idiom, etc of each language. Sure, you can write-in-C in all languages, as the saying goes. But to be a professional, and to paid as a professional, requires a lot more.
newuser94303 4y ago
vb6 does not exist anymore. It is the reason that I refuse to use Microsoft products anymore. I learned other languages, Just not Microsoft languages.
cschep 4y ago
The VB developers I knew used the exact same super high quality IDE to start learning C# and a lot of the concepts either transferred or they would have had to learn them anyway to hop to VB.NET so.. this all just feels like normal forward progress to me.
xahrepap 4y ago
C# and .NET is an MIT licensed code base. Not to mention with a community that built an alternative implementation so strong that MS ended up buying the company the emerged from it. And this was before .Net Core was fully open sourced. I’m not worried about C# or .Net getting nuked.
msla 4y ago
It was technically possible for someone to write a VB compiler and enough of a runtime to integrate VB code with Visual Fred and the rest of the .Net ecosystem. That this apparently never occurred to anyone says interesting things about that development culture, but the big lesson is to not rely on a single source for a language implementation or tooling in general. Go not only has an open-source primary implementation, it has, like, a few thousand righteously angry hackers in its culture who would take Google abandoning it as a personal affront and would work on a replacement Go implementation in a pure example of spite-driven development.
throwaway894345 4y ago
If you know C#, you aren't going to have to "relearn programming", and C#/.Net isn't going the way of VB anytime soon. Moreover, there's so much code in the wild written on this language/platform that there's not going to be any great loss of employability.
repler 4y ago
C# is open source

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

fexecve 4y ago

I was there in those days too. VB was a very beginner-friendly language, more akin to what we call today "low-code" than other languages. Those developers didn't have to "re" learn software development, as you think, instead they probably never knew software development well enough to use languages like VB.NET (which is what all of the VB devs I worked with ended up on). "C# and .NET" is equal to any language you can think of in terms of complexity, so C# devs are going to be just fine.

tclancy 4y ago

I'm not totally sure what that means. VB and the change to .NET are kind of a one-off event. A "VB developer" could mean anything from someone writing VB/ ASP in a text editor with minimal syntax highlighting to someone using a drag and drop editor and never writing code to someone who was really just writing fancy Excel macros. If you want to suggest some of the people working in a GUI only had trouble making the transition, I suppose it's possible, but .NET offered VB.net and VisualStudio still had drag-and-drop editors. So why would they need to be interns? Because people started organizing code differently in folders and linking DLLs?

stcroixx 4y ago
At the height of VB6 usage, there was no VB.net or Visual Studio. There was the VB6 windows binary that was a GUI form builder and IDE. ASP was brand new and for web development, so there was not much overlap in the dev community. I don't think it was even possible to write VB code in a simple text editor and compile that without the VB IDE. Cold Fusion and Power Builder were similarly corporate controlled and suffered the same fate. A C programmer during the same time period saw almost no changes to their language or job opportunities.

brushfoot 4y ago

> all that VB knowledge and experience was worth exactly zero Except that didn't happen at all. Visual Basic still exists. From Microsoft (2020): > One of the major benefits of using Visual Basic is that the language has been stable for a very long time. (Source: Microsoft, on Visual Basic support in .NET 5: https://devblogs.microsoft.com/vbteam/visual-basic-support-planned-for-net-5-0/ https://devblogs.microsoft.com/vbteam/visual-basic-support-p...) As of January 2023, the latest version of Visual Studio (2022) still offers to scaffold me a new Visual Basic project! And VB exists in other forms, too. The other day, I was coding VBA macros for an Excel spreadsheet for my business. Worked great and saved me a bunch of time.

bitwize 4y ago
VB.NET has only superficial similarities to VB 6 and before. Microsoft discontinued the original VB in favor of VB.NET, but the engine lives on in VBA and Microsoft has used VB6 to build various internal things (I think some of the UI to Windows Defender is VB6). But for most "Microsoft shops", VB6 was a dead end, and that left a lot of VB developers out in the cold. They had to reskill with the .NET stuff (significant, especially in the early 2000s), or starve.
- mschuster91 4y ago
  > I think some of the UI to Windows Defender is VB6 ... What?! Amazing they still have running tooling to build it, and I don't even want to know what bad surprises hide in the redistributable runtime.
- brushfoot 4y ago
  > VB.NET has only superficial similarities to VB 6 and before. There are differences, but the similarities are more than superficial. Some of my first apps were in 6, and then I transitioned to VB.NET in the early 2000s. At the very least, it pretty familiar and intuitive. Even VBA is pretty similar to the VB.NET apps I developed in terms of OOP, syntax, autocompletion in the editor, event handlers, and so on. Again, there are definitely differences, but there was no "[relearning] software development and getting intern like opportunities" like the comment I was replying to said, and my knowledge and experience was definitely not "worth exactly zero." It was just an evolution.

valdiorn 4y ago

If they had to relearn their craft because they changed tools, they weren't very skilled to start with. You've drawn the wrong conclusion here. And yes, I hopped off the .net train after 15 years of using c# and took a job writing python, and some JavaScript. I had done JavaScript before, using jQuery. Now I had to learn react. And they used MongiDB as the primary data platform. I had spent the last decade working with SQL. And it was fine, because my skill isn't tied to a single tool.

arka2147483647 4y ago
This is really naive about how much of effective programming is about knowing the frameworks, libraries, corner cases, idiom, etc of each language. Sure, you can write-in-C in all languages, as the saying goes. But to be a professional, and to paid as a professional, requires a lot more.

newuser94303 4y ago

vb6 does not exist anymore. It is the reason that I refuse to use Microsoft products anymore. I learned other languages, Just not Microsoft languages.

cschep 4y ago

The VB developers I knew used the exact same super high quality IDE to start learning C# and a lot of the concepts either transferred or they would have had to learn them anyway to hop to VB.NET so.. this all just feels like normal forward progress to me.

xahrepap 4y ago

C# and .NET is an MIT licensed code base. Not to mention with a community that built an alternative implementation so strong that MS ended up buying the company the emerged from it. And this was before .Net Core was fully open sourced. I’m not worried about C# or .Net getting nuked.

msla 4y ago

It was technically possible for someone to write a VB compiler and enough of a runtime to integrate VB code with Visual Fred and the rest of the .Net ecosystem. That this apparently never occurred to anyone says interesting things about that development culture, but the big lesson is to not rely on a single source for a language implementation or tooling in general. Go not only has an open-source primary implementation, it has, like, a few thousand righteously angry hackers in its culture who would take Google abandoning it as a personal affront and would work on a replacement Go implementation in a pure example of spite-driven development.

throwaway894345 4y ago

If you know C#, you aren't going to have to "relearn programming", and C#/.Net isn't going the way of VB anytime soon. Moreover, there's so much code in the wild written on this language/platform that there's not going to be any great loss of employability.

repler 4y ago

C# is open source