4 ms·

Sounds like Visual Basic will be a second-class citizen going forward.

lockhouse 4y ago
Honestly, most people still using Visual Basic at this point probably aren’t itching for new features. Stability is a feature itself when it comes to legacy code.
- ricksmith1962 4y ago
  Absolutely. Saying this as someone who codes 100% in VB supporting applications that are 25+ years old. Honestly, I couldn't be happier with the language strategy as I was wholly expecting VB to be discontinued.
  - starik36 4y ago
    .NET itself is about 20 years old. How are you supporting VB apps that are 25+?
    - lolinder 4y ago
      They probably migrated some VB6 apps to VB.NET.
    - SquareWheel 4y ago
      I don't see the contradiction. Visual Basic existed before .NET did.
    - jp0d 4y ago
      Visual Basic is more than 40 years old. The .Net version of the language was released somewhere around 2002, if I recall correctly.
ripley12 4y ago
It has been for a very long time, and that's a reasonable approach IMO. I say this as someone without most of the usual prejudice against VB; I used to work in a large codebase that was half VB.NET and half C#, and didn't mind VB. VB was a little more verbose for some things, but after getting used to the syntax the developer experience was basically the same in each language (yes, with a few small exceptions like XML literals). Ultimately, that's the problem with VB; it's not different enough from C# to really justify significant investments in 2023. There are some die-hards who really like the VB syntax but they're growing ever rarer.
marssaxman 4y ago
Visual Basic had already become a second-class citizen fifteen years ago, when I worked on its compiler team. All the actual design work happened in the C# world, and our job was just to tag along and mimic whatever they had come up with. I had taken the talk of "co-evolution" at face value before going to work there, but after seeing where devdiv actually put its time and attention, that was clearly just a PR story meant to keep VB users comfortable while their language faded away.
- shawnz 4y ago
  > All the actual design work happened in the C# world, and our job was just to tag along and mimic whatever they had come up with. What's the unique guiding philosophy or use case of VB that would justify developing bleeding edge new language features in VB first? Maybe I am just being overly critical here but I just don't see how the use cases which VB accommodates would benefit from getting new features before C# gets them, and the divergence would create unnecessary pain across the whole ecosystem
  - marssaxman 4y ago
    I always saw Basic as the language for non-professionals who wanted to create their own software: hobbyists, amateurs, small business owners, people who have an idea and want to automate whatever it is they're doing, but aren't trying to write code for a living. C#, by contrast, is a proper mainstream language for professional programmers.
    - adra 4y ago
      Replace basic with Lua and read your line back. Just because a language is simple doesn't mean it can't have industrial purposes by whatever gauge you measure things. Theres a bunch of things I wouldn't use basic for just the same with C# and "popular-language-here". Probably the most used programming language is VBA or maybe the Excel macro if you consider that a language.
      - 4y ago
rqtwteye 4y ago
VB.NET should never have happened. It has only superficial similarity with VB6. It was sold as upgrade path from VB6 but that never worked.
- paranoidrobot 4y ago
  Perhaps, but I think it offered people who didn't have exposure to C-like language syntax, an easier upgrade path for their own skills. I was writing stuff in VBA and a little VB6. The move to VB.NET was made easier because of the synax similarities. My move from VB.NET to C# was made easier because by then I understood the framework, and it was just a matter of learning the syntax differences. Maybe that's not such a big deal with a lot more people having exposure to C-like syntax languages like Javascript.
  - cm2187 4y ago
    I followed the same path. Muscle memory is a big deal. Muscle memory is what makes you productive. It’s why those syntactic things actually matter.
- cm2187 4y ago
  I disagree. It only broke backward compatibility with VB6 when VB6 didn’t make any sense. Like byref arguments by default, or the useless “set” keyword, or collections being inconsistently 0 or 1 based, stupid constraints on what types you can expose as a field or property in a class, or no way to distinguish empty strings and null. Having done the transition from VB6 to VB.net, yes there were a few things to learn but that was the only way to move on from legacy design choices.
- pjmlp 4y ago
  I am more radical, .NET should never have happened, rather the original Ext-VOS idea with COM instead of trying to build on top of Java ideas. VB6 was AOT compiled and used COM as its component model, C# should have been similar but for C++ folks, basically what .NET Native came to be. However they really botched UWP execution, when it could have been the proper .NET reboot back to Ext-VOS roots.

Honestly, most people still using Visual Basic at this point probably aren’t itching for new features. Stability is a feature itself when it comes to legacy code.

ricksmith1962 4y ago
Absolutely. Saying this as someone who codes 100% in VB supporting applications that are 25+ years old. Honestly, I couldn't be happier with the language strategy as I was wholly expecting VB to be discontinued.
- starik36 4y ago
  .NET itself is about 20 years old. How are you supporting VB apps that are 25+?
  - lolinder 4y ago
    They probably migrated some VB6 apps to VB.NET.
  - SquareWheel 4y ago
    I don't see the contradiction. Visual Basic existed before .NET did.
  - jp0d 4y ago
    Visual Basic is more than 40 years old. The .Net version of the language was released somewhere around 2002, if I recall correctly.

ripley12 4y ago

It has been for a very long time, and that's a reasonable approach IMO. I say this as someone without most of the usual prejudice against VB; I used to work in a large codebase that was half VB.NET and half C#, and didn't mind VB. VB was a little more verbose for some things, but after getting used to the syntax the developer experience was basically the same in each language (yes, with a few small exceptions like XML literals). Ultimately, that's the problem with VB; it's not different enough from C# to really justify significant investments in 2023. There are some die-hards who really like the VB syntax but they're growing ever rarer.

marssaxman 4y ago

Visual Basic had already become a second-class citizen fifteen years ago, when I worked on its compiler team. All the actual design work happened in the C# world, and our job was just to tag along and mimic whatever they had come up with. I had taken the talk of "co-evolution" at face value before going to work there, but after seeing where devdiv actually put its time and attention, that was clearly just a PR story meant to keep VB users comfortable while their language faded away.

shawnz 4y ago
> All the actual design work happened in the C# world, and our job was just to tag along and mimic whatever they had come up with. What's the unique guiding philosophy or use case of VB that would justify developing bleeding edge new language features in VB first? Maybe I am just being overly critical here but I just don't see how the use cases which VB accommodates would benefit from getting new features before C# gets them, and the divergence would create unnecessary pain across the whole ecosystem
- marssaxman 4y ago
  I always saw Basic as the language for non-professionals who wanted to create their own software: hobbyists, amateurs, small business owners, people who have an idea and want to automate whatever it is they're doing, but aren't trying to write code for a living. C#, by contrast, is a proper mainstream language for professional programmers.
  - adra 4y ago
    Replace basic with Lua and read your line back. Just because a language is simple doesn't mean it can't have industrial purposes by whatever gauge you measure things. Theres a bunch of things I wouldn't use basic for just the same with C# and "popular-language-here". Probably the most used programming language is VBA or maybe the Excel macro if you consider that a language.
    - 4y ago

rqtwteye 4y ago

VB.NET should never have happened. It has only superficial similarity with VB6. It was sold as upgrade path from VB6 but that never worked.

paranoidrobot 4y ago
Perhaps, but I think it offered people who didn't have exposure to C-like language syntax, an easier upgrade path for their own skills. I was writing stuff in VBA and a little VB6. The move to VB.NET was made easier because of the synax similarities. My move from VB.NET to C# was made easier because by then I understood the framework, and it was just a matter of learning the syntax differences. Maybe that's not such a big deal with a lot more people having exposure to C-like syntax languages like Javascript.
- cm2187 4y ago
  I followed the same path. Muscle memory is a big deal. Muscle memory is what makes you productive. It’s why those syntactic things actually matter.
cm2187 4y ago
I disagree. It only broke backward compatibility with VB6 when VB6 didn’t make any sense. Like byref arguments by default, or the useless “set” keyword, or collections being inconsistently 0 or 1 based, stupid constraints on what types you can expose as a field or property in a class, or no way to distinguish empty strings and null. Having done the transition from VB6 to VB.net, yes there were a few things to learn but that was the only way to move on from legacy design choices.
pjmlp 4y ago
I am more radical, .NET should never have happened, rather the original Ext-VOS idea with COM instead of trying to build on top of Java ideas. VB6 was AOT compiled and used COM as its component model, C# should have been similar but for C++ folks, basically what .NET Native came to be. However they really botched UWP execution, when it could have been the proper .NET reboot back to Ext-VOS roots.