5 ms·
Hilarious quote (notwithstanding the fact that bus drivers usually have to work shifts, also on weekends): > Almost all Visual Basic 6 programmers were content
by rob74 4y ago
Hilarious quote (notwithstanding the fact that bus drivers usually have to work shifts, also on weekends):
> Almost all Visual Basic 6 programmers were content with what Visual Basic 6 did. They were happy to be bus drivers: to leave the office at 5 p.m. (or 4:30 p.m. on a really nice day) instead of working until midnight; to play with their families on weekends instead of trudging back to the office. They didn't lament the lack of operator overloading or polymorphism in Visual Basic 6, so they didn't say much.
The voices that Microsoft heard, however, came from the 3 percent of Visual Basic 6 bus drivers who actively wished to become fighter pilots. These guys took the time to attend conferences, to post questions on CompuServe forums, to respond to articles. Not content to merely fantasize about shooting a Sidewinder missile up the tailpipe of the car that had just cut them off in traffic, they demanded that Microsoft install afterburners on their buses, along with missiles, countermeasures and a head-up display. And Microsoft did.
...and it applies not only to Visual Basic, but also to many open source programming languages today. There are the users who are happy with the way things are, who are content to do their job and don't say much. And there are those clamoring for that one more feature that they just have to have, and those are the ones that eventually get heard, adding more complexity and cruft for everyone else.
- interfixus 4y agoFor what it's worth, I am a bus driver these days; a real one, no metaphor involved. And I sufficently disliked and mistrusted Visual Basic that already in the mid nineties I instigated a complete ban on any vb**run.dll on all computers under my jurisdiction. Mainly a heuristic: VB applications tended overwhelmingly to not being worth the inevitable trouble. I have proudly carried this curmudgery into the present century, these days applied to Java runtimes and Mono libs.
- Pamar 4y agoMind if I ask what you allow on your systems, today? Or the last time you worked in IT? (Not clear if you moved away from it or not)
- pjc50 4y agoI think the implication was that his radical puritanism left him unemployable except as a literal bus driver.
- interfixus 4y agoVery droll, but incorrect. Also, I believe the word you're looking for is purism. I'll certainly go along with that. Also also, out of curiosity, where did you dredge up the "he"?
- shanebellone 4y agoFor what it's worth, the male form is generally used when gender is unknown. I suspect those linguistic defaults will start changing soon.
- simonh 4y agoIt's being replaced by they. Which I'm fine with btw.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- bigbillheck 4y ago> where did you dredge up the "he"? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28725669 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28725669
- interfixus 4y agoMoved away by own choice. Never looked back.
- Pamar 4y agoOk, fine. But again, what did you "allow" on the systems you managed back in the day?
- 2-718-281-828 4y agoPublic transportation? I'm curious probably because I do consider switching careers. Bus driving - in my fantasy - provides some of the features I sort of desire (clear schedule, clear expectations) while lacking those I annoy (further educating outside of work, tendency to take problems home with you). What's your situation?
- nevertoolate 4y agoI recommend watching the film Paterson, with Adam Driver (a bus driver in the film)
- HeyLaughingBoy 4y agoAs do I, for reasons that have nothing to do with this thread. It's just a great film.
- 2-718-281-828 4y agoI actually watched it already and in the theater at that. the last movie where adam driver doesn't come across a subtle prick.
- DeathArrow 4y agoFor your own good, let's hope the bus dispatcher of the lines you work for doesn't apply the same line of thinking.
- interfixus 4y agoI wish they did. We work with terrible software.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- pif 4y agoI'd say that Microsoft heard the voices of the poor souls that had to convert the buggy code from the idiots into usable applications.
- alxlaz 4y agoOr: Microsoft heard the voices of the entitled souls who looked at working applications and thought they were bad because they weren't DRY enough or something. That's how we ended up with CRUD apps that are practically indistinguishable from their Visual Basic 6 predecessors, except they're deployed on k8s clusters instead of a 133 MHz Pentium in the corner.
- DeathArrow 4y ago"Why can't we have nice things like SOLID, DRY, domain driven design, abstract factories, builders, decorators, bridges, facades, visitors, mediators, observers, strategies, chains of responsibilities, SAGA, CQRS, log aggregation, distributed tracing, exception tracking to consume 90% of our productive time? 10% for actual functionality should be enough."
- gladiatr72 4y agoI haven't done it yet, but I have a kubernetes t-shirt idea that would involve the line: Kubernetes! solving yesterday's problems again, today!
- orthoxerox 4y agoVB.NET wasn't that different as a language, it was more of a Python 2/3 situation. Lots of overall improvements, but not backwards compatible. Terrible, but not catastrophic. What MS did was break the whole ecosystem. VB6 had thousands of third-party libraries distributed as VBX/OCX controls. VB.NET had effectively zero, because it could only use the new WinForms controls. You could upgrade your codebase to VB.NET using a wizard (that would often fail), but if your software relied on OCX, there was no way forward.
- mysterydip 4y agoThis could be implied with your python comparison, but meanings of things changed as well. For example dim foo as integer(5) in vb6 would give you 6 elements (0-5) of a 16 bit numeric type. In .net it would give you 5 elements (0-4) of a 32 bit numeric type. For those curious, a really good list of changes is here: http://www.thescarms.com/vbasic/vb6vsvbnet.aspx http://www.thescarms.com/vbasic/vb6vsvbnet.aspx
- groestl 4y agoGuess the Python ref is even more fitting then, given their controversy around the meaning of bytes / strings ;)
- teh_klev 4y ago> For example dim foo as integer(5) in vb6 would give you 6 elements (0-5) Then add into the mix the "Option Base" statement, which if it was declared as "Option Base 1" your aforementioned array would only have elements 1-5. Trying to access element 0 would incur a "Subscript out of range" error.
- codeulike 4y agoVB to VB.NET was more to do with .NET arriving with the .NET Framework, and one of the reasons for the .NET Framework was all about keeping up with the (at the time) amazing framework/core library that Java had. It was also about web front ends which of course VB6 could not do. In the old days people used to custom-build massive CRUD desktop database applications for their company to use internally and I built some of those in VB6. Loads of UserControls nested inside each other, solutions with multiple DLLs, you could do it but it was really clunky. Error handling was rubbish. I had also built things in Java and could see what VB6 was missing. .NET fixed that. So I guess the 3 percent of Visual Basic 6 bus drivers who actively wished to become fighter pilots were probably people who had used Java. Java was free, if you didnt want an IDE. Whereas VB6 was actually quite expensive (can anyone remember the cost of a VB6 Pro license?)
- lincpa 4y ago[dead]
- sharemywin 4y agoStandard was like $79 Pro $495
- lincpa 4y ago[dead]
- pungentcomment 4y agoI wish I could upvote you more than once. I'm not a bus driver but a truck driver though lol.
- jjkaczor 4y agoWell - basically, if you wanted to become a fighter pilot and had VB1-6 experience and wanted the "RAD" forms tools, but also wanted true OOP, there was always... Delphi You could do pretty much anything with Delphi that you could do with C/C++ on Windows.
- simonh 4y agoTrue, but that's also true of .NET
- dspillett 4y agoI thing the point being made is that those things were available prior to .net - Delphi existed in a stable state with those facilities long before .net did.
- jjkaczor 4y agoCorrect - but Delphi was available in the VB3-4 timeframe, years ahead of .NET. When .NET was in beta, I managed to participate through a Microsoft friend - and, saw that the writing-was-on-the-wall... I dropped my tentative exploration of Java (I had even become a Sun partner) and focussed all my efforts on C#, I could see that was the way forward (especially considering it was up for ECMA/ISO certification as well) and basically never touched VB.NET or VB again. (Outside of some VBA within Excel/Word/etc)
- TedDoesntTalk 4y agoIt is not true that you could do everything in early .NET that you could do with Win32. Not all Win32 functions were exposed in .NET
- starik36 4y agoYou could always PInvoke into any Win32 function. There was/is even a website to help you with a declaration. https://www.pinvoke.net/ https://www.pinvoke.net/
- orthoxerox 4y ago
- unxdfa 4y agoFair but I wanted to be a fighter pilot because the money was better than driving a bus. So I learned c#. The company I worked for, a software dev house, said that they were VB only be they wouldn’t bring in c#. They died within 6 months of me and everyone else leaving. C# and .Net was a gold rush. VB was only valuable where the primary business function was not software delivery.
- cmiles74 4y agoI'm not down with the "bus driver" metaphor, but the bit about a vocal and active minority steering the direction of the technology for the rest of us certainly rings true. I think a read an article on HN about exactly this, but in the terms of React and Wordpress.
- segmondy 4y agoWhat is wrong with bus drivers?
- cmiles74 4y agoNothing is wrong with bus drivers! :-) I'm not sure comparing software developers to bus drivers is a metaphor that gets us very far... In fact, why some bus drivers might want to really be flying fighter jets also had me scratching my head.
- namaria 4y agoMore like bus drivers wanting to become heavy machinery operators...
- fuzzfactor 4y agoKind of like the loads of everyday bus drivers safely carrying many more users around, compared to the uncommon fighter pilot doing risky things very few users will need to do.
- draw_down 4y ago[dead]
- marcus_holmes 4y agoI see this in the Golang forums a lot. The people who moved to Go a while back, when it was unpopular, because they loved it, aren't that vocal (apart from the continuous cries of "just use the standard library!"). The people coming to the language from other languages, not because they like Go but because they need to use it for work (because it's now a popular language), are very vocal about how they don't like it because it's not what they're used to (though usually this is phrased differently - usually complaints about Go's "inexpressiveness"). I was one of the people who loved VB6 and struggled with VB.Net, wandering through JS and PHP, until I found Go and fell in love with it immediately. I would hate for history to repeat itself and the Go team to make the same mistake that MS did with VB.
- bazoom42 4y agoThe problem wasn’t they added more advanced features to the language, the problem was they changed the whole development environment in a backwards-incompatible way.