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> 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 th

> 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.
- Jtsummers 4y ago
  > They had to reskill... This always baffles me. It doesn't surprise me, but it baffles me. Why are so many professional developers having to "reskill" to adapt to a new language? We're not necessarily talking about new domains (that would be different, there's a lot I don't know about server administration and automation, for instance, given my background primarily with embedded and desktop systems). But a language? And a procedural/imperative language? VB, C, C++, Pascal, Delphi, C#, Java, JavaScript, Ada, Python, Rust, Go, Fortran, etc. are all, fundamentally, procedural/imperative languages with varying degrees of OO, functional, and metaprogramming capabilities distinguishing between them. Some are bigger jumps (I'd point to Rust as the biggest in that group) than others, but what "reskilling" does a programmer or developer need when switching between languages in roughly the same language family? It's not like they had to jump to Haskell or Prolog or something that was majorly different.
  - stcroixx 4y ago
    Did you use VB6? It was less a language and more of a wysiwyg windows desktop GUI application builder. If that's what you learned in school and it was your first professional job, you would have a very difficult road ahead of you learning something like C. Maybe 3 out of the 20 were successful moving on. Some VB apps had almost no code at all that wasn't auto generated by the platform and bound to UI elements to handle button clicks and so on.
    - Jtsummers 4y ago
      I did, yes. But not a lot. > Some VB apps had almost no code at all that wasn't auto generated by the platform and bound to UI elements to handle button clicks and so on. Then they weren't programmers, so I could see them having to "reskill" (actually become programmers). But if they transferred to another wysiwyg toolkit then there is still no reskilling, just relearning (as I mentioned in my cousin comment to this one). Knowledge isn't skill, it's just knowledge. If your knowledge ends at "I know how to use this particular toolkit" and your skill is "I can do it quickly, make it functional, and make it pretty" then the skill should be transferable while the specific knowledge may not be and you may have to learn new knowledge. But the skill remains.
EMM_386 4y ago
VB6 does not equal VB.Net. I personally know developers who switched careers after Microsoft transitioned to .Net. I worked with them around 2001. They didn't understand OOP concepts and were not interested in having to relearn everything. It felt totally unfamiliar and strange to them. Microsoft tried to make the syntax somewhat familiar, but at the end of the day .Net is an object-oriented programming language and VB6, try as it might, was not. And that was too steep of a hill to climb for them.
- canadianfella 4y ago
  [dead]
- geoffmanning 4y ago
  Seriously? Good riddance to the "developers" that couldn't adapt. The job market is littered with garbage developers, and it's exactly the type of developer that can't adapt to a new language or style of programming that are the ones that aren't really meant to be a developer. Hopefully they found their niche in the economy. - Ex-VB6 programmer turned VBA programmer turned VB.NET programmer turned C# programmer turned Python programmer turned Javascript Programmer (and all the non-pro projects and gigs inbetween, C++, Go, Elixir, Java, Kotlin, etc).
- pjmlp 4y ago
  It did not on version 1.0, but most of the differences were fixed in later versions. As if COM as used in VB6 isn't OOP.

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.
Jtsummers 4y ago
> They had to reskill... This always baffles me. It doesn't surprise me, but it baffles me. Why are so many professional developers having to "reskill" to adapt to a new language? We're not necessarily talking about new domains (that would be different, there's a lot I don't know about server administration and automation, for instance, given my background primarily with embedded and desktop systems). But a language? And a procedural/imperative language? VB, C, C++, Pascal, Delphi, C#, Java, JavaScript, Ada, Python, Rust, Go, Fortran, etc. are all, fundamentally, procedural/imperative languages with varying degrees of OO, functional, and metaprogramming capabilities distinguishing between them. Some are bigger jumps (I'd point to Rust as the biggest in that group) than others, but what "reskilling" does a programmer or developer need when switching between languages in roughly the same language family? It's not like they had to jump to Haskell or Prolog or something that was majorly different.
- stcroixx 4y ago
  Did you use VB6? It was less a language and more of a wysiwyg windows desktop GUI application builder. If that's what you learned in school and it was your first professional job, you would have a very difficult road ahead of you learning something like C. Maybe 3 out of the 20 were successful moving on. Some VB apps had almost no code at all that wasn't auto generated by the platform and bound to UI elements to handle button clicks and so on.
  - Jtsummers 4y ago
    I did, yes. But not a lot. > Some VB apps had almost no code at all that wasn't auto generated by the platform and bound to UI elements to handle button clicks and so on. Then they weren't programmers, so I could see them having to "reskill" (actually become programmers). But if they transferred to another wysiwyg toolkit then there is still no reskilling, just relearning (as I mentioned in my cousin comment to this one). Knowledge isn't skill, it's just knowledge. If your knowledge ends at "I know how to use this particular toolkit" and your skill is "I can do it quickly, make it functional, and make it pretty" then the skill should be transferable while the specific knowledge may not be and you may have to learn new knowledge. But the skill remains.

EMM_386 4y ago

VB6 does not equal VB.Net. I personally know developers who switched careers after Microsoft transitioned to .Net. I worked with them around 2001. They didn't understand OOP concepts and were not interested in having to relearn everything. It felt totally unfamiliar and strange to them. Microsoft tried to make the syntax somewhat familiar, but at the end of the day .Net is an object-oriented programming language and VB6, try as it might, was not. And that was too steep of a hill to climb for them.

canadianfella 4y ago
[dead]
geoffmanning 4y ago
Seriously? Good riddance to the "developers" that couldn't adapt. The job market is littered with garbage developers, and it's exactly the type of developer that can't adapt to a new language or style of programming that are the ones that aren't really meant to be a developer. Hopefully they found their niche in the economy. - Ex-VB6 programmer turned VBA programmer turned VB.NET programmer turned C# programmer turned Python programmer turned Javascript Programmer (and all the non-pro projects and gigs inbetween, C++, Go, Elixir, Java, Kotlin, etc).
pjmlp 4y ago
It did not on version 1.0, but most of the differences were fixed in later versions. As if COM as used in VB6 isn't OOP.