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Ask HN: Why did Visual Basic die?

• fuzztester 3y ago
  Just partly on topic: the code name for the first version of Visual Basic (or its predecessor) was Ruby, IIRC, as recounted by Alan Cooper (the "Father of Visual Basic) in an article I read some years ago.
  • fuzztester 3y ago
    That is also mentioned in the History section at: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Visual_Basic_(classic) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Visual_Basic_(classic)
• mattl 3y ago
  There's still Visual Basic .NET, is it much different productivity wise? I assume the language has changed enough from classic VB.
  • Zelphyr 3y ago
    I honestly haven't used it because I thought they had retired it altogether. The last time I did use it was about 20 years ago and found that they had changed it enough that I wasn't nearly as productive with it as, say, VB6.
    • mattl 3y ago
      The Wikipedia article suggests it's still around and that it's being focused more towards rapid development. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Visual_Basic_(.NET) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Visual_Basic_(.NET)
  • progmetaldev 3y ago
    While it is vastly different from VB6, I found that knowing VB6 at least gave me a leg up on understanding what they were going for. Once I was familiar with Visual Basic .NET, I realized how much less syntax was involved with C#, while still being able to use the same libraries. I never looked back, except for my first professional job where my "lead" didn't know C# very well, but knew VB.NET. He made me code in VB.NET, but eventually I took over the project, then immediately extracted the VB.NET code into DLL files that I called from C#, and wrote the remaining application in C# until I could refactor everything into C#.
• gregjor 3y ago
  VB didn't die. It got reborn as VB.NET. Still supported, still used. https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/visual-basic/getting-started/ https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/visual-basic/gettin... The classic VB you probably remember got end-of-lifed in 2008, but MS still supports classic VB apps.
  • PaulHoule 3y ago
    I think that’s the sense in which it died in that if you were going to switch to .NET you would probably also switch to C#. The original VB had A GUI builder better than almost anything (even today!) but the UI builders in today’s visual studio support C# as well if not better than VB.
    • atlantic 3y ago
      I once had a job offer from a big company that developed exclusively in VB.NET, after transitioning away from VB6. Both for desktop and web. So it's still out there.
    • quaintdev 3y ago
      And everything in that IDE was fast and super responsive. Today's IDE are more complex than ever and yet they lack in functionality that was present in VB6.0
      • hulitu 3y ago
        Yes, but look how good the dark grey text blends into the black background. /s
    • Zelphyr 3y ago
      You bring up a good point, which is that I remember most the GUI builder. Basic isn't really that great a language, all things considered. But being able to quickly design and deploy GUI apps with VB was better than anything I've encountered since. There are things like WebFlow and FlutterFlow but those tools feel clunky by comparison.
• purpleblue 3y ago
  VB6 morphed into VB.Net but then the web took over and anything that could be accomplished as a desktop app was replaced by a web page.
• ilkhan4 3y ago
  IMO, it didn't really make a smooth transition to the web. Webforms was the attempt but it was a leaky abstraction (iirc, it kept state for UI components but not variables so things got... weird) and kind of worked against the paradigms at the time (everything was a POST).
  • chubot 3y ago
    Yeah exactly, VB dying is sort of the CONVERSE of programmers adopting platforms, not languages - https://old.reddit.com/r/ProgrammingLanguages/comments/sk6w1c/programming_languages_as_biological_strategies/hvkxp4n/ https://old.reddit.com/r/ProgrammingLanguages/comments/sk6w1... - Why is JS popular? Not because it's the best language, but because it's attached to the browser, and people want to deploy apps to browsers (Figma, etc.) - Why is shell the 8th most popular language on Github, and the 6th fastest growing? [1] Not because it's the best language, but because it's attached to the Unix kernel (specifically Linux, which has a ton of features). Software in containers and virtual machines must talk to kernels. So then the converse is - Why is VB no longer popular? Not because it's a worse language than it used to be (though maybe that's true), but the platform that it supported isn't as popular. Like others said, it's probably popular for Excel and app automation, etc. But today more apps are targeting web and mobile, not Windows desktop. - Same answer with Objective C and Swift -- people are using them to write apps for a platform. And Kotlin/Android, etc. [1] https://octoverse.github.com/2022/top-programming-languages https://octoverse.github.com/2022/top-programming-languages
• mamonster 3y ago
  Does VBA for Excel count? Because if it does then VBA for Excel has reached the"nuclear resistant cockroach" level in finance. You wouldn't believe what sort of processes in very big banks/financial institutions are built using 10 year old VBA macros. In fact, VBA consulting for finance is a very juicy cottage industry at least in Europe to this very day.
  • datavirtue 3y ago
    There is a book called: Professional Excel Development. If you want to get into it. You could probably use that book to build an OS in Excel. I'm not joking.
    • jandrese 3y ago
      It's no more crazy than trying to build an OS out of a web browser.
    • Flowzone 3y ago
      This sounds like it would be right up my alley. I'm not a professional developer of any kind but have done hobby coding on/off for years, and I'm better at excel than the average user. Currently working for a consulting company with a whole region's health system as the client. They use excel for lots, but it's all very basic stuff. I had one of my team members spend an hour whipping up an excel form for them that auto generates letters to different departments with all the necessary information. Even some basic standard work forms, let alone any sort of automation, would help them a lot as they rely on people to send certain information that gets missed every time. They described our excel sheet as a game changer for them. Almost no-one has access to their ERP system which is safeguarded by a certain department which is ridiculous. I'm working on a spreadsheet for their HR team to calculate bonuses for certain employees based on a bunch of variables, then auto-generating letters to review and distribute. The data from their ERP software is such a mess, but I'm making up for it by cleaning up their reports in excel. I plan to get access to their ERP system to look at what kind of reporting I can do as HR only gets a report from the system once a month. I want to help them track real time stats for hiring, etc. And curious if I'm able to connect some spreadsheets to their ERP with an API or something (haven't done anything like that before). Anyways, that professional development for excel book looks interesting. I see the second version is from 2009 and may not even be up to date with 2007 excel. I'm sure most of the concepts would stay the same though, so I'll definitely have to check it out. I realize excel wouldn't be considered the most professional or robust way to build applications, but since microsoft 365 seems so standard and everyone uses excel, it makes sense to me why so many organizations use it. There seems to be a lot of potential to apply some excel automation in a lot of industries, especially ones that already rely on it as others have mentioned in this thread. I use it as a means to an end when helping clients, but I also see dollar signs as I find ways to build things that can be applied to so many industries.
• solardev 3y ago
  Are you talking about VB the language, or Visual Studio the IDE with its awesome GUI builder for WinForms (and not so awesome ones for the subsequent Windows GUI layers, forget what they're called). VB is still around but desktop apps in general (and thus VS's GUI builder) largely gave way to web technologies invented outside Microsoft. The dev experience is definitely worse though. Visual Studio was sooooo nice and integrated. I don't think this is really VB or NET's fault, Microsoft just kinda missed (or failed the fight against) the web transition. They were busy trying to make it coexist with Windows with seamless downloads like ClickOnce but ultimately simple web pages won out for their reach and ease of use, then mobile app stores came along, and now desktop apps are petty much dead except for niches.
  • hulitu 3y ago
    > web pages won out for their reach and ease of use, Your definition of "ease of use" is amazing. /s
    • solardev 3y ago
      Heh, point taken. But I'd say overall it's easier for grandma to go to Gmail to check her email than have to figure out what this "Netscrape Communicator" is, install it, set up her "pop three" from her "eyesp" and then deal with a million viruses. Yeah, the web ain't perfect, but it did win... ads got worse, though =/
  • Shorel 3y ago
    I remember, in some sense, Google (and also a group of anti Microsoft developers) encouraged web development as a strategy to break the Windows software monopoly. So it's not that Microsoft missed it, it is that a big shift happened and it was specifically targeted against them. There's nothing they could have done, except to embrace it, and they did. Visual Basic Script existed and was very popular for a while. IE4 ruled the web. The shift to web based technologies is a Google and an open source win. And it is also an inferior experience. That was the price we paid =)
    • 3y ago
• eschneider 3y ago
  I got the feeling that a lot of the corp/small business apps that used to be developed in VB and deployed to PCs have been replaced by Web-based apps.
• twoodfin 3y ago
  It’s simple: Corporate internal app development (mostly CRUD stuff, as you’d expect) was the bread-and-butter of VB, and it moved wholesale to HTML & JavaScript.
• anta40 3y ago
  >> I have yet to find a tool that can allow me to be as productive in so short a time as Visual Basic. For me: Delphi or Lazarus
• rogerclark 3y ago
  VB died because of .NET and VB.NET. The syntaxes were similar, but VB.NET was much closer to a "real programming language" in feeling and complexity than VB was, and that's not what anyone who used VB actually wanted. Microsoft was more interested in developing .NET and C# to battle Java, and less interested in developing and promoting VB, their own successful and original product.
  • deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
• donohoe 3y ago
  I wonder the same thing about Apple's HyperCard. I used HyperCard a ton at school and side-projects. Visual Basic was a firmer and better step-up from that imho, less so as VBScript when it came to browsers. As per other comments VBA is alive and well and I did many consulting gigs using that in Ireland in the late 1990s. I hope, in the name of all that is holy, that code isn't running still.
  • Zelphyr 3y ago
    I wonder about HyperCard as well. I never used it but, from everything I've ever heard about it, it was also an amazing developer experience.
    • RodgerTheGreat 3y ago
      Why not give Decker a spin? It's similar to HyperCard, but open source, runs nearly everywhere, and it's under active development: http://beyondloom.com/decker/ http://beyondloom.com/decker/
  • foolz 3y ago
    A bit of an unrelated topic, but if you liked HyperCard you might be interested in https://hyperscript.org/ https://hyperscript.org/ and their related project https://htmx.org/ https://htmx.org/
• bryanlarsen 3y ago
  My personal reason, which is probably unique: VB 1.0 was extremely buggy, making it unusable for my use cases. VB 1.1, which fixed the bugs I was encountering, was a paid upgrade. I switched to Linux and never looked back.
  • jules22 3y ago
    VB 5 and 6 were where things worked. They both had native compilers.
• xnx 3y ago
  If Microsoft had put more effort into Internet Explorer and VBScript (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VBScript https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VBScript), today's web could look very different, and in some ways better.
  • unnah 3y ago
    How many incompatible languages called VB-something did Microsoft create? There's at least the classic Visual Basic, VBA, VBScript, and VB.NET. Although to be fair, the distinction between the language and libraries has never been very clear in BASIC variants.
    • progmetaldev 3y ago
      Although not starting with VB, there's also QBASIC, as well as another BASIC dialect I believe Microsoft bought in their early days. QBASIC isn't a drastically different language than Visual Basic, VB just added graphical components.
  • progmetaldev 3y ago
    I can see where you are going with this train of thought, but Microsoft really blew it when it came to providing too much functionality to the web before having a fully formed plan. The amount of security issues was a precursor for basically every web based plugin technology that came after it (ActiveX, Java Applets, Flash/Macromedia Director, Silverlight, etc.). I'm not sure on Silverlight vulnerabilities, because I had been forced to learn ActionScript 3 with Flash, and it left a bad taste in my mouth. It's very possible that Silverlight wasn't full of security issues, and was a good technology that was just killed along with general plugin technology when Apple stopped supporting Flash.
• starik36 3y ago
  Visual Basic 6 was very productive - yes. But it was considered by many to be a toy language (it didn't support class inheritance for one). VB.NET - at least initial versions - was about productive as C#, thus there was no incentive to use VB. The thing that made VB6 super productive was it's form designer. The .NET successor - WinForms designer - wasn't nearly as fast and capable (to this day, really).
• smackeyacky 3y ago
  Microsoft accidentally killed it moving to .NET and the increasingly stupid GUI libraries they offered up. Silverlight, 32 bit native, winforms etc and etc. Web development meanwhile went bonkers and VB was a poor cousin to C# very suddenly. Its a shame, VB was not for purists but it was very productive.
  • oaiey 3y ago
    Do not say WinForms is stupid. The rest I am more than okay with.
    • bmitc 3y ago
      I don't think they did. They said increasingly so. They're just getting at Microsoft continually re-inventing the wheel and then abandoning that wheel when it comes to their GUI libraries. There's WinForms -> WPF -> UDP -> WinUI, Xamarin Forms -> .NET MAUI, and then the evolution of Avalonia and Uno as third-parties trying to step in. And all of those options still exist! You literally have a minimum of 8 GUI options, at least on Windows. There are of course more by external parties.
      • RajT88 3y ago
        ASP .Net Core comes with it's own host of options: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/aspnet/core/tutorials/choose-web-ui?view=aspnetcore-7.0 https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/aspnet/core/tutorials/choo... If I am doing desktop development, you can bet I am still using WinForms, which are relatively easy to debug (if not as pretty) as WPF. I am usually building internal tooling, without paying customers, and sometimes for a user base of just me.
  • kemiller2002 3y ago
    It wasn't accidental.
  • dotnet00 3y ago
    Agreed, .NET (well, C# specifically) was my go to for anything with a GUI until they tried moving on from Winforms/WPF and the way forward seemed to become a large undefined mess.
• nickstinemates 3y ago
  There's still no better GUI toolkit out there than VB6 that I have used. It was amazing. Problem is a lot of apps that would have been traditional LOB apps written in VB/C# have moved to the web so demand isn't there's clear advantages to C# as a language over VB.
  • datavirtue 3y ago
    Netbeans Java Swing GUI builder is far better. That's without factoring in the enormous third party component landscape that is available.
    • wing-_-nuts 3y ago
      Oh man, I remember building GUI apps with it in college. My professor only let me use it on the condition that I could fully explain what every component was doing. I could. I took the generated swing code and added a massive amount of comments, but even having to do that I was still an order of magnitude faster than every other CS student without. A lot of my peers were super jealous that I had so much free time, but they weren't willing to invest time in their tools (gdb, perl, regex, sql, etc). It was quite the force multiplier.
• dghlsakjg 3y ago
  I think for a lot of purposes, the internet kind of took over. VB was great if you needed to do something limited to a single machine. These days, we want data to be available across machines which requires using a network, and the default network is the internet. If I'm going to be using the internet anyway, I can knock up something in HTML + JS + firebase/whatever data store, and have an application that works on any platform, and is accessible from anywhere in the world. You might need slightly more technical knowledge, but not so much that you can't have a simple CRUD app running in a day or so of work.
  • _f1dq 3y ago
    I can write HTML/CSS/JS and a few back-end languages like PHP in my sleep but there's no way I could hand-code a web app as fast as I could a desktop app in 1997 using VB. I would LOVE it if I could, though.
    • bsimpson 3y ago
      I've never written VB, but I can bang out a React UI in jsxstyle like nobody's business. You've piqued my curiosity.
      • pdntspa 3y ago
        Check out Lazarus and FreePascal
      • jlarocco 3y ago
        Development in VB6 was basically dragging and dropping controls onto a window or dialog box, setting properties on them, and then filling in snippets of code to tie things together. And "control" here means anything from simple labels and buttons up to database connections and embedded COM objects. Literally anybody could bang out a simple Windows .exe like nobody's business. It would have been really cool if Microsoft included it in the OS like they used to do with QBasic.
    • christophilus 3y ago
      Same. I’m very good at cranking out Tailwind + React UIs, but nothing touches the productivity I had with VB6 or even early C# and Winforms.
• crazygringo 3y ago
  I used VB all the way from 1.0 to 6.0. And when VB.NET came out came out in 2002, that was exactly when all the types of GUI-database projects VB6 was used for professionally, started being built in PHP/MySQL/HTML/CSS instead. The switch would have happened anyways, but the fact that VB.NET wasn't backwards-compatible made it really easy to switch since you were going to have to learn/build something new anyway -- otherwise there probably would have been a somewhat longer transition period. Microsoft really shot themselves in the foot (but the web benefited). And then on the hobbyist/personal side, that's also basically when casual developers switched from building fun Windows apps to building fun websites. So I'd mark it up entirely to web programming replacing it on both sides. As for what a replacement might look like, Google had created App Maker (2016-2020) that got replaced by AppSheet (2020-present), which is the closest I've found for the drag-and-drop GUI/database aspect of VB6. But those have been very much geared towards business development, not kids learning programming. Maybe some parents here can chime in on what their kids are learning to program in? [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_App_Maker https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_App_Maker [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AppSheet https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AppSheet
  • oaiey 3y ago
    Good explanation. Hobbiest switched. Because IIS and Asp.net run very well with VB.NET. but who could afford that compared to PHP.
    • TylerE 3y ago
      The bigger pain point, from memory, was having an ODBC-compliant driver so the OS could actually talk to your DB. That basically meant MSSQL if you wanted to co-exist happily with early dotnet.
      • oaiey 3y ago
        Databases access was a mess then in general. But yeah, completely agree with your sentiment. PHP was just so much easier with common databases.
• Pxtl 3y ago
  DotNet is meant to be the replacement. The big problem though is that MS keeps failing to make a GUI framework that is quick-and-easy as VB forms were. Winforms still exists, and it's only a bit clumsier than VB forms, but it's very old and not modern. The more modern .NET gui-frameworks are much less user-friendly. Linguistically, I think the successor to VB is Powershell. It's the same mashup of inconsistent flags that let you swap between "this is a serious language" and "I'm smashing crap together" with tons of unexpected weird behavior, but instead of being a quick-and-dirty GUI app maker, it's a Shell. Hardcore focus on being easy and productive but unforgivably warty. As for VB itself, VB.Net just didn't offer much value distinct from C#, so most people who were coding in VB switched to C#. So if you're an old longbearded MS LOB programmer who started before .NET, and you're still working in Microsoft LOB shops, you're probably doing similar stuff but with C#. But realistically, you've probably also switched to Web. And the lack of the VB-level ease-of-use in web technologies is a whole other story. All the hoary mess of using a document-engine for a cross-platform application server makes it pretty untameable.
  • progmetaldev 3y ago
    For a while there we had WebForms, which was used much like WinForms, but generated the controls in HTML, CSS, and JS. That technology was very much not fun to work with, for the few projects I used it on. I built a full website using Sitecore CMS back when it was fully WebForms, and having come from PHP for web development, it was painful. It tried to paste over the way the web worked, which would have been fine had I never touched web development. Once ASP.NET MVC was introduced, things got much better for .NET developers. I actually learned VB6 alongside Java in school, so migrating to VB.NET was fairly easy for me, but once I saw C# I jumped ship immediately. I turned my existing VB.NET code into DLL files and called them from C# from that point forward.
• j1mmie 3y ago
  Not sure how accurate this is, but: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YqxeLodyyqA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YqxeLodyyqA Visual Basic's popularity peaks in late 2001. Exactly when VB .NET was launched. Then it drops like a rock. In my memory, .NET overcomplicated VB and yet still felt like a kids toy.
• ChicagoDave 3y ago
  VB (and BASIC in general) has a legacy of being a procedural language. In the late 90’s and early 2000’s, there was a massive push to leverage object oriented programming and design. The births of Java in the 90’s and then C# in the 2000’s were clear catalysts to abandon procedural programming. Of course in .NET VB has nearly all of the OO capabilities that C# has, but I think most developers just decided to go “all-in” on object oriented programming and learn C# and graduate from their procedural past. A lot of colleges taught Java and moving to it or C# in the workplace was a much more natural process. There are BASIC alternatives and they are fairly strong offerings, but I think OO and functional programming are the standard today. That means python, Rust, Golang, Ruby, C#, and Java are the mainstream languages.
  • Zelphyr 3y ago
    Honestly, I was never a fan of Basic but I still don't understand why there isn't a GUI app builder as productive as the VB6-era tools were for any language.
    • ChicagoDave 3y ago
      Devs don’t design user interfaces anymore. There are separate disciplines for user experience, graphic design, front-end development, API development, and data storage choices. There’s no reason to have a drag and drop UI builder anymore.
      • serf 3y ago
        not everything is a team effort, and the desire espoused all over this thread for an equivalency clearly demonstrates that there is a 'market' there. when some small developer is making a silly one-off app for a mom&pop local store to facilitate a one-off kind of task they aren't interested in handing off work and splitting meager profits. not every company has the whole "front-end/back-end/devops/ux/design/management" paradigm going on. the reality is that microsoft , a fairly litigious group of people, abandoned a concept for their own reasons; and the rest of the market doesn't exactly know where they can step in that minefield of offering equivalent features to a piece of software that is still on life support by a very very large/valuable/litigious company.
• mighmi 3y ago
  We had plenty of amazing paradigms/development environments/holistic experiences which we've regressed from: - LISP environments - Smalltalk environments - Symbolics genera - Mesa and Cedar - Apple's Newton Besides things like Oberon...
• Meph504 3y ago
  vb didn't die, it evolved into vb.net, but the market place has shifted to C# for the most part. What has died, is the maturity of microsofts tool set, they keep changing their concept/design/platform. silverlight/wpf/uwp/winui2|3/etc.. vb was around for nearly 2 decades and had a very mature tool set, everything since then hasn't gotten nearly that sort of life span or dedication to tool sets. Developing in visual studio now, is more like web dev in the 2000s, I can't tell you how often you have to go to the xaml and make correction or adjustments that the UI just can't get right, or just goes bonkers and can't render the UI at all until something is fixed. It is really sad, because the power of those old drag and drop builders that just worked meant that prototyping and mocking up applications was much much faster. now standing up a UI based project takes ages, I'll usually do a console application now, and are dumping results to a API or console.
  • oaiey 3y ago
    People always worry that Microsoft is silverlighting (that is a verb now) MAUI. I think that would be the end of VisualStudio. The word Visual had a meaning. When they would give up MAUI in favor of React Native (like Office) or Blazor (like the popular opinion), why the hack someone would buy a VS license. And when the think they could again commercialize .NET itself, then .NET would be dead. Modern Java, Flutter and TypeScript would easily swallow their market shares. MAUI, Blazor and .NET are an awesome set of products if they would just put some more concentration in MAUI.
• pvg 3y ago
  Take a look at this article and chonkthread from a few months ago https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35192913 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35192913
• beardyw 3y ago
  I feel as if I remember using a VB compiler back in the late 80s. Am a hallucinating?
  • unregistereddev 3y ago
    VB was first released in 1991. If you're certain that you remember it from the late 80's, then you may be thinking of QBASIC. I first learned to write code in QBASIC running on MS-DOS.
    • progmetaldev 3y ago
      I had a computer graphics class that used QBASIC around 1994. It was probably already outdated, but switching graphics modes and making sprites animate was actually easier then than what you find now. I'm certain it's because there is so much more you can do now, but that feeling was exciting! I actually had my first computer graphics class on an Apple IIe in 1993, and that was definitely outdated at that time. I built a fish bowl with waving seaweed and a fish that would swim to the right and reappear on the left.
• nick__m 3y ago
  as a VB replacement https://www.lazarus-ide.org/ https://www.lazarus-ide.org/ seems quite solid
• dang 3y ago
  Related. Others? Something Pretty Right: The History and Legacy of Visual Basic - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35192913 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35192913 - March 2023 (259 comments) RAD Basic – Compatible with Visual Basic 6 projects - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31282195 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31282195 - May 2022 (208 comments) Ask HN: Modern, easy-to-start with alternatives to Visual Basic - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30606244 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30606244 - March 2022 (11 comments) Microsoft plots the end of Visual Basic - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22570684 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22570684 - March 2020 (280 comments) Ask HN: What is the modern equivalent of Visual Basic? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20548849 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20548849 - July 2019 (10 comments) The Rise and Fall of Visual Basic - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20255140 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20255140 - June 2019 (149 comments) Visual Basic Turns 25 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11755041 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11755041 - May 2016 (145 comments) Why I am called "the Father of Visual Basic" (1996) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9229434 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9229434 - March 2015 (80 comments) The Birth of Visual Basic (2006) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8438845 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8438845 - Oct 2014 (59 comments) Linus Torvalds, Visual Basic Fan (2006) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6005587 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6005587 - July 2013 (48 comments) The Silent Majority: Why Visual Basic 6 Still Thrives - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4085372 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4085372 - June 2012 (91 comments)
• jasode 3y ago
  >nothing I have found compares to that development experience today. I would go so far as to say we've gone backwards in a big way. I did Visual Basic 3.0 through VB 6.0 corporate development for a few years back in the 1990s. The closest equivalent today for desktop apps that still has Microsoft's focus on future innovation is C# with Windows Forms. (I downplay the "obvious" comparison of VB.NET to VB 6.0 because Microsoft already said they will "stop evolving" Visual Basic .NET -- so that's a technology dead end and will fall further and further behind the latest C# as the years go by.) I personally don't experience that C#/Winforms has gone backwards from VB 6.0. Workflow feels much the same as VB6: Drag some GUI components like text boxes and buttons onto a form, code the controls' event handlers, build the exe.
  • HeyLaughingBoy 3y ago
    I've only done a small amount of VB programming, but from what I remember of it, WinForms + C# is lightyears ahead of VB.
• bborud 3y ago
  While I was never a big fan of VB, I agree that the developer experience has been getting worse for most languages since the early 1990s. Do you have a top 3 list of things you miss?
• jdminhbg 3y ago
  The web is cross-platform and easier to deploy. The (non-?)existence of RAD tools for it vs VB pales in comparison to that advantage.
• dboreham 3y ago
  Same reason as Borland Pascal.
  • unnouinceput 3y ago
    I guess you never heard about Free pascal/Lazarus then.
• efsavage 3y ago
  I started my career with VB/VBA/Access, but got burned by one of their non-backward compatible upgrades (I don't remember which versions) that derailed an important project. This was around the time that Java was what the cool kids were using, and I was very amenable to trying open source after that experience, and I never looked back. It was a great experience though, especially for a self-taught beginner long before code academies and YouTube.
• bmitc 3y ago
  I think the answer is: because Microsoft let it. I'm a big fan of modern .NET, but my biggest complaint is that Microsoft views, and always has, the CLR as the C# Language Runtime and not the Common Language Runtime. For example, see the relationship between F# and C#. The CLR is constantly getting features that are only to support features in C#, leaving F# in a position where they either don't get the feature, can't add the feature, or begrudgingly add the feature to keep up compatibility with C#, which is something it does take seriously. But this has the effect of "dirtying up" the F# language by either adding features that don't really belong in the language or keeping features out. The other thing is that C# consistently adds features to itself that are inspired by F#, since F# already implements these features on the CLR, thus showing their viability. So what happens is that C# continually approaches a more bloated language with a subset of it being a poor copy of F#. But then F# gets dragged along towards having a small subset of C# in it for compatibility purposes. So it's simultaneously making both languages worse. Even the iron languages project that lead to IronPython, IronRuby, etc. was a bit of a Trojan horse to test out and exercise the CLR and .NET with no intention of ever providing long-term support for those projects. The DLR, which was implemented to support those, appears to be just maintained by a skeleton crew of people invested in it, probably by those interested in keeping IronPython up and running. I do not understand why Microsoft takes this approach. It is myopic, shows a misunderstanding of their own technology in the CLR, and ultimately turns C# into another C++, leave dead languages and projects in the wake.
  • themerone 3y ago
    The F# situation is not comparable to VB.NET. VB.NET was just C# semantics with a VB like syntax. From the beginning it didn't serve any purpose except to make VB Fans feel slightly more at home.
    • bmitc 3y ago
      I think it's comparable in the sense of what I was pointing out: Microsoft only truly cares about C# and only keeps F# and VB.NET going just enough.
  • nobodyandproud 3y ago
• HumblyTossed 3y ago
  Maybe it didn't. What I mean is, maybe the purpose for VB died and thus the language just kinda went away.
• dwheeler 3y ago
  Visual Basic (both of them) still exist, but their use has dropped dramatically through some big changes: * "Visual .NET" (aka "Visual Fred" http://catb.org/jargon/html/V/Visual-Fred.html http://catb.org/jargon/html/V/Visual-Fred.html ) was released by Microsoft. This was an incompatible language confusingly also called Visual Basic. I don't think Microsoft realized how angry this made developers and businesses, who were being asked to spend hundreds of billions of dollars (USD) to rewrite code just to keep the same functionality. Before that time, many thought that Visual Basic's wide use gave it a kind of "herd immunity". I don't have numbers with me, but I remember that years later that a study found that some were sticking to the original Visual Basic (even though it was no longer supported), a few had moved to Visual .NET, and many other had abandoned Visual Basic entirely (some to C#, others beyond). In short, the Visual Basic community was split into multiple communities, and anyone using Visual Basic would have to worry about either lack of support or yet another harmful change. * The rise of the web and of platforms other than Windows (including Android, iOS, MacOS, Linux). Visual Basic is fine when you send files via sneakernet to another Windows user. Now people want to access through their web browser, smartphone, etc. If you have a website, anything can access it (as long as they have the permissions), and you don't have to worry about synchronizing data changes the way you do if people make changes on their local device. Most of the simple "fill in a form" kinds of applications that Visual Basic was used for are more sensibly web applications (server side or client side). Visual Basic is still used. And yes, I think there could be better tools for developing software. But as best as I recall, that's how we ended up here.
  • kdmccormick 3y ago
    Lol, my first programming gig as a teenager was performing a VB6 -> VB.NET "upgrade" of a 200K sloc legacy desktop application, which obviously ended up being a total rewrite. Everything in my career since then has seemed easy in comparison.
    • mdeeks 3y ago
      If this was mine, I'm so sorry :) Just kidding, I actually know my VB6 code is still running in prod. VB6 did let me learn to program very valuable utilities from scratch, with practically no programming experience. I probably owe my entire career to it and VBA. I took a C++ course once and it nearly turned me off of coding completely. VB6 saved me.
• bazoom42 3y ago
  The web happened. VB was great for builing stand alone desktop applications, possibly with database integration. But they never managed to deliver a similar slick and self-contained solution for building web-based solutions. It didn’t help that the migration from vb6 to vb.net was too painful, but the root cause was the demand for business desktop apps disappeared. The infamous WebForms API was supposed to bring the same gui builder paradigm to the web, but the developer experience was not as great.
• ToddWBurgess 3y ago
  How about some love for Quick BASIC? That was my big Christmas present once upon a time when the dinosaurs still roamed the earth.
  • potamic 3y ago
    Oh you spoiled little children with your integrated development environment and in place editing. Real programmers used GW-Basic with consecutive line numbers.
• asveikau 3y ago
  With VB.NET, VB basically turned into C# with different syntax. I think a lot of people in that space might as well have been writing C#, so a lot of them switched. Then separately, perhaps almost simultaneously, the Microsoft ecosystem lost relevance.
• runjake 3y ago
  You're probably speaking to VB plus Visual Studio RAD (Rapid Application Development aka "drag and drop" GUI programming) and you more or less still have that today with VB.NET and Windows Forms, with minor differences. What killed the older VB6 and it's APIs, whose name I can't recall even though I developed for it in the 1990s, was .net coming along. Be warned, it might just be easier to learn C# as it's more well-supported/documented, and VB.net seems like effectively a language dialect of C#.
• habibur 3y ago
  New version of VB was VB.net. People still used VB.net primarily as they were familiar with VB. But the new projects gradually took over C#.net, as it sounded more cool. VB.net died after a while.
• bilsbie 3y ago
  You really couldn’t beat that GUI creation system. I don’t know if we’ve ever come close.
  • unnouinceput 3y ago
    Delphi or if you prefer the free version, Lazarus might have a word to say about that.
• pdntspa 3y ago
  You might want to check out Lazarus if you can stomach Pascal
• codeulike 3y ago
  People want more these days. With VB you could write a CRUD application that saved data to a database and ran some reports. But now people want the database to pull in multiple feeds from other businesses via API, people want it to be available on the web, it needs to have a self service component so the customer can also log in, at the back end the database is connected to several other systems with daily feeds coming in and out. Shit is just much more complicated these days.
  • polotics 3y ago
    VB6 could do all these things and more, in the 90's I built just the right small parts in C++ to glue things together, and we could do multi-processing, resilient multi-server setups, and much much more. Serving HTTP for some always-limiting browser was an obvious easy sidenote, ie. what your mantra "available on the web" wraps in silver, but leveraging the full power of the desktop and OS was what power users actually wanted, and would still want now if the apps were there. I think some people at Microsoft realized VB had the potential to canibalize a lot of what they wanted as their proprietary backyard, and they killed the baby before it would grow into more of a mass movement. Now they succeeded, many that would have been educated into owning their computers now mindlessly click on "Yes" and are lost in the adds panopticon, but then MS had to non-compete some of the pie off to Google and co...
    • codeulike 3y ago
      Right, you could do all that with VB but most people didn't. Exception handling was crap in VB (no call stack) so we wrote a Visual Studio Macro that would go and edit every single method to add "On Error Goto" with a block at the end of the method to automatically add the method name to a homemade exception object so that when there was an error we could actually tell where it was coming from. So you _can_ do that too in VB but it wasn't pretty.
• stephc_int13 3y ago
  IMO the OOP trend of the 90s (Java, C++, Objective-C) made VB look bad.
• pythonbase 3y ago
  I started my career with FoxPro for DOS, dabbled a bit with Visual FoxPro and then I found Visual Basic. Spent a lot of fun years with it before moving to ASP and web development in general. Not exactly sure what was the reason for its demise. I guess .NET killed it.
• paxys 3y ago
  > despite all the advances in technology since then, nothing I have found compares to that development experience today You are going to have to qualify this a lot more, because it is absolutely not true. Coding VB was...fine. Language features were primitive, even compared to what was available in the mainstream back then. The tooling was fully proprietary and expensive. Languages and IDEs today are 1000x better in every way.
  • AnotherGoodName 3y ago
    It's the Python of yesteryear. Nothing about the language was great but the ecosystem was amazing. CRUD app creation was almost completely point and click, VBA was easy and you could take data straight from a document and process it in complex ways, the database integrations were great and easy to use.
• MrTortoise 3y ago
  they did linq badly after linq2xml and linq2sql
• labrador 3y ago
  Python is the new VB
  • kwhitefoot 3y ago
    Not if you are trying to create a GUI.
    • labrador 3y ago
      I've enjoyed several Python programs over the years that had a nice Windows GUI interface https://wiki.python.org/moin/GuiProgramming https://wiki.python.org/moin/GuiProgramming
      • jules22 3y ago
        Me too. But it just was never enjoyable creating those UIs. I have tried almost all of them. The closest Python had to VB was Boa Constructor. It never really took off. https://boa-constructor.sourceforge.net/Screenshots/ https://boa-constructor.sourceforge.net/Screenshots/ Python is light years ahead of VB6 in productivity in scripting, except when it comes to putting together a quick database frontend or just any other GUI app. My favorite was Delphi over VB. Nothing ever came close in Python in GUI building, even 25 years later.
• danman114 3y ago
  I recently wondered: Why is there no VB-Like tool for building Electron - Apps using eg. React-Widgets & Javascript as the scripting - language? I'm not married to Electron vs. another similar, possibly more modern / less ressource hungry alternative; or another Frontend Framework. But it seems to be it should be possible to do a VB-Style thing using these kinds of tools, Drag+Drop, and Javascript, most of the components should be available already... And it could be a fun environment for prototyping, having fun, creating really bad games & greeting card apps again like in the 90s/2000s etc etc. It could be a fun learning environment for newbies while a powerful GUI builder for multiple platforms for experts.. Why isn't there such a thing? Would somebody please build this? :D
• rootusrootus 3y ago
  From my perspective, Microsoft killed it. It did not die on its own. The upgrade path from VB6 to VB.NET was basically unusable. You either stayed on VB6 or you rewrote the application.
  • deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
• sproketboy 3y ago
  [dead]
• ilrwbwrkhv 3y ago
  Honestly it's because Microsoft sucked at marketing. There were so many confusing name choices and unclear development guidelines that people simply stopped using it. Even now developing for windows is a pain and that's because there is like 5 different ways to build an app there.
• yarone 3y ago
  I used VB 3.0 thru VB 6.0 and I echo the sentiment: those were fun and productive times. Really solid integrated development environment centered around the desktop UI / form design / UI controls like buttons, textboxes, combo boxes, etc. I also agree that the web changed everything and that is the major reason for the shift away.
• FpUser 3y ago
  >"nothing I have found compares to that development experience today. I would go so far as to say we've gone backwards in a big way" >"I have yet to find a tool that can allow me to be as productive in so short a time as Visual Basic" I have and do program in many languages. From my perspective - for type the of applications usually done in VB Delphi / Lazarus would run circles around it. Both productivity and performance wise. It is also possible to do things one simply can not accomplish in VB.
• billywhizz 3y ago
  Steve Ballmer is the answer you are looking for I think.
• mamcx 3y ago
  The reason is even bigger than just VB. MS at the time just decide to fully kill the "enthusiast" developer and the "single/truly small" team developer. This is mostly covered under the "RAD" umbrella. It kills VB, FoxPro, and now more evidently, Access (more like let it slowly die). .NET + Visual Studio + Sql Server are not a substitute in this market. Them are for "professional developer"/"a small cog in a big machine". The worst part is that this move somehow kill the other tools in this space (because somehow others follow suit or whatever) and without somebody leading the charge to see how adapt this tool for the web. MS not getting the Web, Borland doing Hara-kiri and others getting annihilated by "free" open source and all that not helps. Ironically, this market have rebound in the myriad of tools like "low code, notebooks, etc" that fill (badly!) the gap.
  • bonzini 3y ago
    Serious question: what is a good alternative to Access (edit: to build a GUI frontend to a database)? The database design tools and basic forms were incredibly easy to use, and there were very good tutorials for everything else. LibreOffice Base is different and not even close in comprehensiveness, and there seems to be nothing replacing it that isn't a super expensive SaaS.
    • steve1977 3y ago
      For a long time I would have said FileMaker, but considering the strategic moves of Claris in the last few years probably not anymore
    • Biganon 3y ago
      Filemaker?
    • dijit 3y ago
      The parents point is that there is no alternative, because everyone left the market chasing Microsoft.
    • LeifCarrotson 3y ago
      SQLite. It's not close in terms of ease-of-use of the GUI administration and forms, but as a single-server database solution to embed into a line-of-business app it's fantastic.
• eternityforest 3y ago
  The FOSS community could do SO much better if they wanted to, with reactive web tech, typescript instead of basic, a project file format that's easy to work with in Git, Android support, etc. Despite all this talk about no-code, it seems like all we have now is like, a CMS that lets you embed Google maps, but if you want to do anything more you have to use code. Maybe it's just that end users usually don't need to build anything anymore, there's almost always an professionally made app for everything. I've tried many times to "Build the app you want to see in the world" and almost every time the result is I decide that living with and working around the imperfections of what's out there is more practical than building and maintaining anything by myself in hopes of the the very small chance people notice and it becomes A Thing. Perhaps better dev tools like VB aimed at one off software like that could change the equation, and if the tools existed we'd all find uses for them?
  • gumballindie 3y ago
    > with reactive web tech, typescript I very much doubt. Actually reactive frameworks such as react and languages that transpile in other languages such as trypescript are the reason they couldn't. These overcomplicated, seemingly well architected, tools are in fact just a fractal of poor design.
    • eternityforest 3y ago
      I've never seen anything else that even comes close to working that well for making a responsive GUI. With everything else you spend half your time manually adding and removing things from list view controls and such. There are some pretty big architecture issues. Like the fact JS and TS are still separate things(Google tried to fix that with native Dart in the browser, looking back it would have been amazing) and the fact that there are dozens of reactive frameworks that come and go. Most of that wouldn't exist/would be papered over so nobody noticed, in an end to end, "We plan to not break this for the next 25 years" tool like VB or Excel. But everthing new comes with a move fast and break things expectation, people are less interested in creating new 30-year standards now, and that doesn't seem to be how stuff is done. Complex stuff is considered disposable these days.
• anon____ 3y ago
  On Linux, Gambas is a great replacement. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gambas https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gambas https://gambas.sourceforge.net https://gambas.sourceforge.net
  • gumballindie 3y ago
    My go to language / ide for when i just need a gui to get something done in a few clicks on linux.
• mulmen 3y ago
  I just recently wanted to spin up a simple CRUD UI over a simple DB schema and also thought of Visual Basic for the first time in a long time. It seems so well suited to something like building operational tooling for the endless parade of internal APIs.
• EMM_386 3y ago
  I was a VB6 developer in the 1990s, and I actually wrote a pretty well known product with it (I bet most people didn't know it was VB6 underneath!). When I got my first job in software engineering, it was when .Net was in beta. Since I only knew VB, I chose to go with VB.Net and Windows Forms. Well, that was quite a jarring introduction to actual object oriented programming! This is the point when a lot of people surrendered. The change was too much, there was no path forward for VB, and Microsoft wanted everyone on .Net. I eventually switched to C# and we had a hybrid application for a while before it was all ported to C#. It actually went on to become industry leading software in its space. 20+ years later, that doesn't seem to have been a bad choice. Windows Forms is very simple, with a powerful drag-and-drop designer, double-click to hook up events, it's all very similar. Yes, you have to understand object oriented programming much more than you would have under VB, but that's as close as you are going to get from Microsoft on the desktop. They try to hide it as best they can. I still use Windows Forms if I need to put together something that "just works" on Windows as a desktop app quickly. It's unmatched for that. There are newer technologies, such as WPF, WinUI3, Avalonia and others for .Net but they come with a complexity that would be above your typical use-case for VB6 back in the day. The VB6 user who just wanted to get stuff done probably doesn't want to have to understand how to implement the MVVM pattern just to get a UI.
• anigbrowl 3y ago
  The development paradigm was great. I wish three were something similar for Python, having to switch to TCL/TK for UI stuff is extremely annoying.
• Apreche 3y ago
  Because you could only use it if you paid for it. If they had released it for free, as in beer, lots of people would have made wi does apps with it.
• nobodyandproud 3y ago
  What made VB6 super-productive and quick to get up and running also made it terrible for long-term maintenance, because it hid too much of the details. Then there were language warts like set versus let (strong vs weak pointers), for example, which was way above the paygrade of the average VB6 coders; and having to rely on the Win32 API anyway in order to start doing actual work and work around all of its limitaitons. One thing VB6 did do right was forcing interface-based inheritance: Composition over class inheritance was seen as a weakness back then but it was proven as the right concept. This is just my opinion!
• aristofun 3y ago
  Popularity of a language is like a popularity of a soda - it's never about the inherent quality or features, but always about the company that stands behind it.
• dahwolf 3y ago
  Not just VB, but also things like Borland Delphi. 25 years ago, you could visually compose a UI using standardized components, including advanced concepts like a layout manager. You could do data-binding visually by navigating a linked database. You can write logic/events just by double-clicking a button and the event is created. Here you'd write your code which would typically be pretty easy because all contextual objects are readily available. Sure enough, I understand that the above development model also has its limitations and doesn't serve all common modern needs. But still, it's pretty pathetic what we ended up with. Our tool chains are much more complicated and we program at a lower abstraction level whilst requiring a laundry list of skills.
  • askvictor 3y ago
    Having used both early in my career, Delphi absolutely shat on VB. But I'd be really interested to see the code I wrote in the 90s and see how it stands up in terms of reliability, maintainability, testability etc. The closest thing I've found in the modern age is https://anvil.works https://anvil.works - basically works like Delphi/VB, but web based, and in Python. For both frontend and backend.
    • lelanthran 3y ago
      > The closest thing I've found in the modern age is https://anvil.works https://anvil.works - basically works like Delphi/VB, but web based, and in Python You haven't used Lazarus (https://www.lazarus-ide.org/ https://www.lazarus-ide.org/)?
  • ulope 3y ago
    And everything looked like the same unusable mess with 25 nested tab groups and tree views
    • postalrat 3y ago
      Do you have an example screenshots of what you are talking about?
• nerdix 3y ago
  Visual Basic was mostly used for LOB applications. That stuff mostly migrated to the web. When businesses decided to move those applications to the web, they had a choice between C# and VB.NET (if they stuck to the MS stack). C# ultimately won. Most of the old VB developers that are still around have converted over to being C# developers now. When everything was a desktop app then the choice was C++ or VB and there were a lot of situations where VB "won". Today C# does everything VB used to do but better on the desktop and non-performance sensitive applications are increasingly using Electron anyway. Performance sensitive desktop app = C++ Windows focused non-performace sensitive desktop app = C# Cross platform non-performace sensitive desktop app = JS/TS in Electron Web app = anything but VB
• layer8 3y ago
  Microsoft effectively killed VB because they decided everyone should be using .NET. While they created VB .NET in an attempt to make the transition palatable to VB programmers, this was a second-class citizen to the CLR, and more importantly too different from VB, more akin to an inferior C# with VB-like syntax than actual VB. It was widely decried by VB developers [0], and nick-named "Visual Fred" due to really being a different language than VB. Microsoft ignored that, and also didn't bring a VB-like experience to .NET. It didn't help that mainstream software development started drifting to the web, and later also to mobile apps. [0] https://classicvb.net/vfred/breaks.asp https://classicvb.net/vfred/breaks.asp
• zubairq 3y ago
  I am actually trying to make an open source successor, but using Javascript instead of Basic, at https://github.com/yazz/yazz https://github.com/yazz/yazz and a demo at yazz.com
• deafpolygon 3y ago
  VB died because Microsoft killed it off (through other products).
• unoti 3y ago
  Related but off-topic: Nothing I see today compares to the productivity that I saw with Lotus Notes, Dbase 3 and 4, Paradox, Microsoft Access, Foxpro, and a few other things from that era. There are some really good SAAS offerings that target this space (e.g. Airtable), but none of them seem as dominant as I would expect. There was a time that if you wanted a simple application that could be covered with 3-4 tables and 5-6 views, any of the things I mentioned above could handle it. You could explain the business problem and hand a developer a book on any of the above technologies and expect to have a working product a month later. Today, this isn't really true. It does seem we've gone backwards a bit...
• wruza 3y ago
  Yet I can't help wondering what problems it had that caused them to abandon it? Tech comes and goes, there’s nothing to vb specifically. As a language it’s pretty limited, tedious and quirky. Moreover, why hasn't someone come out with a solid replacement? Because webdev at its core is a community of stubborn smart guys who love the complexity and hate dull business code. They will present absurd arguments like I can do this and that, as if it couldn’t be packed into a vb component and drag-dropped onto a form from a palette without accompanying 1kloc boilerplate and pages of configuration documentation with no sane defaults. VB GUI model may be obsolete, gray and non-responsive, but no one prevents from building responsive interfaces wysiwyg way. My peer web designer does it without bothering with html/css much and it works for her for decades. All the tech is there, it’s just nobody’s collective interest to combine it into a business RAD instead of an intermediate haskell-level mindfuck starter kit. You can’t burn hundreds of millions doing actual work on a platform that everyone could start using solo in just a few days and deliver a working solution next week, even if raw and clumsy as it usually goes with non-pros. I’d like to get a better and less bitter explanation, but there is none.
• kgwxd 3y ago
  Windows only desktop applications died.
• smitty1e 3y ago
  VB lives on as Visual Basic for Applications, but you have to have MS Office to get that. What is lacking is a compiler to make a stand-alone file. MS Access has the most robust Application object, in my experience. Basic as such has, e.g. https://www.freebasic.net/ https://www.freebasic.net/ > What problems it had that caused them to abandon it? My understanding is that the ActiveX goodness that makes VBA quite handy for your stand-alone needs is also a security nightmare.
• jhoechtl 3y ago
  Because C# as a contender to Java had to succeed (and the CLR)
• JackMorgan 3y ago
  The productivity wasn't really that good. Rose tinted glasses. All the VB apps I've seen (and still get paid to maintain/rewrite to this day in the finance world) are an order of magnitude simpler than even a simple modern website. They often only have a few users, no devops automation, no deployment automation, terrible logging, terrible instrumentation, no tests, unacceptable access control, tons of failure edge cases, and poor performance. Most don't even have central databases, they just sit on Access and get copy pasted around like spreadsheets. While the UI part of Visual Basic was fast and easy, so is writing a React frontend that just stores data in browser LocalStorage, has no authentication, no logging, no monitoring, no tests, and deployment is emailing an updated js file to customers. The complexity of modern development enables 10-100x better productivity across all aspects of: safety, security, monitoring, error handling, maintenance, and new feature development. I can whip together a modern website that ticks all these boxes. To achieve the same in VB+Access would be monumental.
  • yc-kraln 3y ago
    I was with you until "... so is writing a React frontend". No. No it's not. Making a functional UI in visual basic is childs play compared to the absolute cesspit of NIH and feature treadmill that frontend web development has become. You are gatekeeping with strawmen.
    • JackMorgan 3y ago
      I was trying to compare like for like on features. Slapping together a few fields and a button in react and posting the results to an unauthorized endpoint doesn't feel any more difficult to me than the same in VB. However, it's certainly an order of magnitude more complex to use react with all the features expected of modern development with design systems, auth/z, logging, monitoring, etc.
      • taeric 3y ago
        I'm deploying react to a CDN for a living, and I would have no idea how to instruct someone to "slap together a few fields and a button" and put it somewhere meaningful. As a kid, I remember making full blown D&D character sheets based on an easy Access backend. You could even print them out. I want to, but I just can't back any claim that things have gotten easier for pretty much anything. With a ton of extra power on the compute side, parts of the machine have gotten attainable. But nothing about the process is easier along the way.
• RyLuke 3y ago
  I actually wrote a long article on this [1]—and had a chance to interview some of the team that built the original version of VB that was sold to Microsoft. (Alan Cooper and Michael Geary; Michael actually frequents HN pretty regularly!) My opinion is that it was a confluence of a few factors: - Microsoft was very worried about the threat of Java/Sun, and rotated hard into .NET and the common language runtime as a response. - The most vocal, but minority of VB users wanted more advanced functionality and a more powerful/expressive language (as is often the case). Couple with the shift to .NET, Microsoft listened to them: VB got a full rewrite into an object-oriented language and the IDE moved further away from the VB6 visual building paradigm. That left the silent majority high and dry. - The web emerged. Working with the Win32 API was suddenly less relevant, and younger devs adopted PHP en masse, rather than adopting VB. (And existing VB6 devs upset about the change also migrated over when they could build for the web instead of Windows) Unforced error on Microsoft's part, since IE had 96% browser marketshare in 2001. [1] https://retool.com/visual-basic/ https://retool.com/visual-basic/
  • radicalbyte 3y ago
    The web and the way MS handle the web killed it. Microsoft was pushing everyone towards these horrible activx components. Many moved to PHP or Adobe Flash. I was using MS Access back in the day to solve business problems - it was like a VB6 DSL focused fully on data-driven applications. It was extremely time efficient thanks to that focus - what took me days to build took a VB developer (or PHP developer) months. That died thanks to web (and the web version being horrific and a dataleak waiting to happen). The move to C# and the path they've followed since then was, looking back, the way to go. I only wish that they had done more to make the experience for native programmers better out of the box.
    • jamra 3y ago
      In my experience, ActiveX was not what they pushed. They pushed Asp.Net Webforms which used VBScript for the template language. The ViewState monstrosity made it an awful experience. Specifically how it send way more data than needed to and from the server on each request. I shiver when I think of it.
• deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
• InitialBP 3y ago
  From a security angle... .net webapps written in asp.net behave similar to PHP in that any file with a .aspx extension that is within the web root will execute by default. This means that asp (and php) webservers are particularly vulnerable to RCE attacks because the default configuration of the server turns an "arbitrary file upload" into a remote code execution instead. Where an asp.net server would handle front-end and api and they would be tightly coupled, we've moved on to where the most common configuration is a separate API and frontend. I believe you lose a lot of the benefit of using asp.net to try and decouple them. On a totally personal note, as a penetration tester I've proxied requests from a LOT of different APIs on a lot of different technologies and asp.net is hands down one of the worst to test, the way it handles requests under the hood is unruly and ugly. Some might say that's a positive in terms of security, but IMO it makes it harder to identify vulnerabilities in your system.
• st-keller 3y ago
  We built some pretty big applications with VB6 (heavily optimized by using WinAPI-Calls and C++-libs where necessary). Nothing what came later matched development speed (although some langs using REPLs may come close). Whoever designed VB.NET didn‘t know anything about the things VB6-developers like my loved. So VB died because what came next simply wasn‘t VB.
• glonq 3y ago
  Back in the WinForms era of .Net, I got the impression that anything you could write in VB you could write in nearly-identical-line-for-line C# (minus the language syntax differences). Once it became just a subset of C# with different syntax, I suppose it had little reason to exist because nothing made it special anymore.
• kwhitefoot 3y ago
  It didn't die, it was murdered.
• _blk 3y ago
  Easy answer: the index of arrays doesn't start at 0
• glonq 3y ago
  VB was a godsend for me. Despite being a very capable DOS and embedded/RTOS developer, the learning curve for the ugly tools and API's for Win3.1 development was more than I wanted to handle. It was magical how easy it was to build little tools and line-of-business apps in VB. And after eventually learning MSVC and MFC/ATL, I was even more impressed with how easy VB was compared to that. But .Net killed VB because C# was enough for both noobs and for real programmers.
• magic_hamster 3y ago
  First of all, desktop software just isn't as popular as it used to be. Everyone wants to develop a webapp or a packaged app. Second, Microsoft consolidated all of their languages into .NET right around the time you're describing, and they all get translated into the same middle language before being compiled. Maybe except C++? Not sure. Either way there's really no reason to choose VB when you can have C# and they all get converted to the same thing. Lastly, Basic was always seen a "hobby" language, a reputation which was carried over to Visual Basic. So once again, serious programmers will look at the Visual Studio suite and go with C# or C++.
• deleted 3y ago
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• rsynnott 3y ago
  I do wonder if there’s an alternate universe where MS did a better job of modernising VB (VB.NET hardly counts), and where Borland was less doggedly intent on murdering their golden Delphi goose, and where frontend development is now quite easy.
• j45 3y ago
  It's similar to Microsoft Access. Not for everyone, but still did some things few other tools do out of the box. VB was a form of relatively low code, relatively speaking to other ways of building applications. There was a swing from the desktop to the web, but it wouldn't be unrealistic to say building web apps that render the same html/js/css became at least a few orders of magnitude more complex during that time too. There remain personalities, belief systems and practices that believe things should be difficult and not easy to become a beginner in for it to have value for a few instead of the many.
• davidthewatson 3y ago
  I was working in C++ on OS/2 at the time when a resource editor was hard to find and that chasm from the command line to the GUI was what made the jump to commercial software development feel like the Khumbu Icefall. I worked in a small software development sub at a big bank and they needed a rolodex. I agreed to do it in my spare time if they'd buy me a legal copy of VB 1.0. I did the prototype in what feels like a glacial week today, but they followed through with lunch and a shrink wrap copy. If there's a death of GUI or IDE development tools it's the same for all of them with the possible exception of the outer edge of Jet Brains and VSCode. Put simply, they don't scale like command line tools since you're dragging a 200 ton freight train of GUI bloat behind you where it doesn't deliver the impact gravity that the train does. HCI or GUI should scale like APIs do, but they don't, particularly now that resource editors are everywhere, and we're about to replace highly paid drag and drop mouse typists with nearly autonomous agents. Humans benefit from visual affordances like VB because VB lowers the bar, or the barrier to entry. GUI development would still be stuck in the late 80's if Cooper hadn't made it possible for the inmates to overtake the asylum with their drag and drop tools.
• Joel_Mckay 3y ago
  The DAO and OLE Automation was a paradigm that saturated the market with similar applications, and the move to mobile/cloud platforms essentially made the computational overhead a liability. Yet in a way Microsoft VB helped standardize the look of event driven GUI workflows (also why windows 11 design sucks). VB "made simple things easy, and difficult things impossible" in a developer environment. Its funny that the ecosystem of OCX still haunts many projects. It could be Python took over the role of an introductory language. =)
• jiggawatts 3y ago
  Speaking of nostalgia and Microsoft deprecating great low-code development tools… I miss Access Data Projects. These had the Access front end and VB rapid app development experience, but were backed (only) by SQL Server. This mode wasn’t the classic ODBC external table connector. If you added a table in Access, it would create a table in SQL. If you created columns, foreign keys, or views, the changes would be made directly to the database schema. This also eliminated the data corruption issues that plagued file-based databases. It truly was one of the fastest and best ways to write an internal-use business app. So of course, Microsoft took it out to the back and quietly drowned it in a tub.
• michaelteter 3y ago
  Despite being dead, I suspect there are a large number of very high value Excel workbooks with significant lines of VB(A) in them. I've experienced 9 digit ventures which fully depended on large (hundreds of MB) Excel workbooks which talked to dbs, remote APIs, and network files to make complex calculations. It's invisible to most of the world, but it's definitely there and alive.
• nologic01 3y ago
  The broader question is, why did "Visual Programming" die, or rather, why is it always rather niche. Visual type coding / low tech coding, drag and drop of computing blocks and other GUI based programming approaches is a perennial promise and brilliant examples light the sky every once in while like fireworks (Scratch, Web "Mashups" [1] come to mind as other examples). The outline of the answer must be that the capabilities enabled with such GUI oriented programming styles don't hit a sweet spot with large numbers of less technical knowledge workers. Compare e.g., with the spreadsheet paradigm that is a resounding success despite Microsoft. But why that is is not clear. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mashup_(web_application_hybrid) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mashup_(web_application_hybrid...
• morninglight 3y ago
  Visual Basic died for the same reason that Win 7 & Win 8.1 died. ..
  • keymasta 3y ago
    Windows 7 only died because Microsoft said so, and then others listened. Fearmongering about security updates, I don't get. Let's say you get a virus, then you nuke + reinstall, while keeping user data/installers on separate drive. That is good enough "security" for me. The second part about "others listening" is more problematic. I'm talking about version numbers for node, docker, python, etc. So you're then forced to use something modern, so linux in a VM. Typically I will approach development with a boycott on technologies that require new oses. So Python 3.10 it is. Also node/npm to me just sucks. I like older stuff, because it was better, like js/html/css. The document is the document, not running through lots of build tools to finally become the document. Or stuff that simply still works. To me it's easier to use a game engine -> HTML5 then node + react for web dev. Yes it's bad for accessibility. But it's not based on brittle building. When I'm targeting "old works" it has the advantage that the software AND dev environment still works later (assuming win 7). I wish less languages/frameworks/etc on would stop deprecating it. It's still the best os to actually use. You get git bash so normal commands work. Win 7 feels like linux without randomly nuking your os for your terrible mistake of enabling automatic logon or something. How dare a user change a setting, I guess you're nuking your os now. In a VM linux is good because snapshots mostly alleviate the random breakage. Typically you only have to re-install every several years. And honestly linux is like way better than windows obviously, EXCEPT the random breakage and badly coded interactions and environment fragmentation. Win 7 just boringly works well. No injected ads. Low resource usage. Os doesn't hari-kiri randomly </directionless misguided rant>
• stcroixx 3y ago
  No fault of its own. We simply stopped building windows apps and started building for the web instead. The best web apps still pale in comparison.
• xyzelement 3y ago
  A few thoughts - loved VB and made my first money as a high schooler by programming in it. As far as I can recall it was the only programming language that let you begin by laying out the UI and then wire up the code later. Like your project started up with a blank Windows window. You drag a button or a text area and you hit Run and your app right away has a window, a button and a text area. To write code for the button click, you click the button in the editor and write it. A few years later jBuilder (I think) allowed you to do something like with Java, that though not as simply. I am not aware of any dev tooling that offers that today. I suspect a few things happened that made VB go away. I think VB was aimed at one-man dev, not sure how it would work with revision control and team development (eg when u think of your project as a window you drag stuff onto, how do you deal with merge diffs etc.) I also think the world migrated to more client server / web stuff around this time, while VB was very married to a standalone windows app. And then on the flip side, probably coding became stronger in excel so some of the stuff moved there. VB was amazing, such a pleasure to create in.
• Octabrain 3y ago
  I've mentioned here in other occasions, but worth doing it again: GAMBAS (https://gambas.sourceforge.net/en/main.html https://gambas.sourceforge.net/en/main.html) is a cool, modern and powerful alternative to the old good VB RAPID stuff. I haven't personally used it in ages but I recommend to give it a shot.
• gwbas1c 3y ago
  I learned Visual Basic (6) a few months before I learned C#. Hands-down, C# was a much better language. Visual Basic (the language) always left me feeling dirty compared to C#. Both languages have similar learning curves for a novice; but C# includes industrial strength features that allow code written by a novice to be refactored instead of rewritten when the need comes along. Both languages have a similar way for designing a Windows Forms UI, and the API for working with the UI from code was generally similar. Once C# came around, there really wasn't a reason for using Visual Basic 6 for a quick-and-dirty UI because you could do the same thing in C# in the same amount of time. (So why waste your time with Visual Basic at that point?) I personally think the "VB.Net" situation is what really killed Visual Basic. There really was no reason to force everyone to rewrite their projects, because VB.Net didn't "add" anything. Instead, VB.Net turned into a smell that someone wasn't savvy enough to use "real" C#. I personally don't know when I'd pick Visual Basic 6 over C# for a Windows application; but I have a pretty serious development background. I also noticed that novice developers tended to come up to speed with C# rather quickly, so I'm not sure if the more casual nature of Visual Basic 6 really helped anyone.
  • pellenys 3y ago
    The casual nature is what made it so popular. You could write some fairly disciplined code with VB6, but once you turned Option Explicit off and added some On Error Resume Nexts and embraced variants, you had something you could write with without knowing much about programming. I’m a big fan of C#, but I’m a professional developer and I know how types and exceptions work (for example). I knew plenty of have-a-go managers who would have balked at C# but produced reams of…interesting…VB6 code.
• yoava 3y ago
  Visual Basic died because of the Web. VS, and Delphi, are the masters of creating desktop applications. However, both failed to port to the web, and them to mobile. There are a lot of reasons why they failed - * missing graphical expression capabilities for customer facing websites * using languages that are not native JS, preventing them from utilizing the JS eco-system * Vendors (Google, Apple) who for their own reasons kept mobile development native on their language and tools. And many more reasons. Last, both have paved the way for low code application builders for enterprises, which are mostly aimed at internal systems (not customer facing). Worth noting that we, at Wix, have built the Wix dev platform learning from VB and Delphi, creating a website builder platform with similar concepts (I am the creator of Velo by Wix, the Wix dev platform, and having 10 years experience programming VB and Delphi).
• throwaway5752 3y ago
  "On Error Resume Next" I like a lot about the language, but let's not let nostalgia run away with some of the bad points. And that's not even getting into COM/OLE registry mess, or difficulty of handling c type/vb type mappings when interacting with the api. A lot of what I liked, I now like about powershell or python.
• cebert 3y ago
  To be clear, Visual Basic isn’t dead. I work in the govtech space. I can assure you that there are VB6 applications still running into production in this space, even places you would not expect. VB6 doesn’t support threading, but I’ve seen Computer Aided Dispatch applications that use C++ to multi-thread VB6 server code for emergency 911 dispatch. VB6 still runs on Windows, and will even work just fine in AWS.
  • system2 3y ago
    I've seen very established finance firms using DOS software from 90s. Still in 2023. Hard to imagine but it is what it is.
• Dwedit 3y ago
  It was killed by VB .NET, a different language that looks similar to VB6/VBA on the surface but has nothing at all to do with it.
• Brian_K_White 3y ago
  This seems like an asshole move when there already is Librivox for decades. Many of the readers of Librivox are not great, but I'd rather have the worst of them over AI. Even a future better AI that knows more about when to pause and how to pronounce things the right way from context, will still be lifeless because it can't actually understand the full context, only the surrounding words. The actual full context of a given word or phrase requires not only pattern-matching the surrounding words, but having a sense of self and inserting that self into the described situation, and applying that selfs response to that, which will be not only more lifelike and realistic and meaningful, but also be a bit different for every different human reader. Good readers aren't simply doing it more correctly, their own unavoidable interpretation of the text is in their reading, even if they are trying to be a robotic neutral newscaster. Sometimes I'm actually annoyed by how a reader reads a given sentence differently than I would have. Like they failed to realize what the thrust of the thing was and focussed on some other part. But even those are better than an AI that will either always apply the same algorithm, or worse, maybe varies it but only randomly, not as a result of having a personality that colors everything. I guess at some point they will be able to make AI's that can fake the quasi-random-consistency of a personality. If someone can describe the problem like I just did, then someone else can code up a response to it. And then it will be good enough to essentially fool most not-very-perceptive people, and that will suck because it means we won't have a choice to avoid that crap any more. Much content will simply only be produced this way, because it will be cheaper to make and good enough for most people, and so will sell. Once it's good enough to sell, that's it, that's what happens almost exclusively after that. Like bluetooth headphones.
• royaltjames 3y ago
  I learned VB when I was 8 and built a few games with it. I wish I kept coding :'(
• timdietrich 3y ago
  For anyone looking for a modern alternative to Visual Basic, you might want to take a look at Xojo. Xojo's a rapid application development platform (both a language and an IDE) that you can use to develop desktop apps (for macOS, Windows, Linux), Web apps, mobile apps (for iOS and Android), as well as console apps. It's been around for more than 20 years, and some of you might remember it from back when it was called REALbasic. I'm a solo custom software developer that specializes in NetSuite, and I'm using Xojo to develop all kinds of apps that integrate with NetSuite - from desktop apps to mobile apps to Web APIs. There's a blog post on Xojo's site that provides a good summary of how Xojo is both similar to and different from VB. It's an older post (from 2013), and Xojo's come a long way since then. https://xojo.com https://xojo.com http://blog.xojo.com/2013/06/19/a-modern-alternative-to-visual-basic/ http://blog.xojo.com/2013/06/19/a-modern-alternative-to-visu...
  • rlpb 3y ago
    Talking of alternatives, I'm also aware of Gambas, though I've never tried it: http://gambas.sourceforge.net/ http://gambas.sourceforge.net/
    • pcdoodle 3y ago
      Xojo is much better but costs $$$. I don't write software all day so I pay for a license every few years if there's new features I want.
  • thewrinklyninja 3y ago
    Pascal is still around as well with a great IDE Lazarus. https://www.lazarus-ide.org/ https://www.lazarus-ide.org/
• pcdoodle 3y ago
  VB6 allowed me to write apps "On Site". I'm talking crazy stuff like a customer asked for a personal phone call when the apartment building maintenance room door was opened: 1 Google VB6 LPT READ (Run a wire from alarm panel to LPT port pins) 2 Google VB6 Modem Dial (Hardcode customers cell phone and add exe to startup folder) 3 Bill the customer for 30 minutes of "software development". I've never been more productive than with VB6 and sample code of the web. I do not write software for a living and the lack of tools like it are a real bummer.
• bottlepalm 3y ago
  C#/WinForms is the spiritual successor to VB. Even better than VB6.
  • deleted 3y ago
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• pcdoodle 3y ago
  Another fun story: A strip club was asking for a camera system and pos system in 2006. I already had a nice PCI based capture solution for the CCTV system but the POS software was still an unknown. When I learned that the average cost per terminal was going to run me $700/ea., I decided to write my own POS in VB6 (Along with Receipt printer stuff, USB Card Swipe Stuff, Authorize.net Etc). This was completed in about 1 month while still living in my moms basement. We had a lot of fun sitting in the security room popping the cash drawers as a prank and having the girls complain over the radio about them being possessed. Long live VB6!
• YLYvYkHeB2NRNT 3y ago
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• deleted 3y ago
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• nsonha 3y ago
  I was typing "visual programming fails because of collaboration", as in testing, code reviewing etc, but then graphic designers can collaborate on projects so I don't exactly know.
• manicennui 3y ago
  I think the path from VB.Net to C# was too easy and C# offered too many advantages.
• wmidwestranger 3y ago
  I'm curious if I should have been more kind to Visual Basic because I went with C# and I'm still in love with Ruby. There doesn't need to be a barrier to more powerful and efficient coding, as far as I can see. Even when the technology allows expression, the human element is usually the barrier.
• sn_master 3y ago
  Microsoft stopped supporting it. VB 6 was the last "true" Visual Basic. The .Net Visual Basic was not backwards compatible with the very large code base projects everyone had created over the years and ones on forums and websites like planet-source-code (before GitHub existed) and the many, many beginner-friendly books. They had a conversion wizard to migrate VB 6 projects to VB.Net but it was very half hearted and never worked on anything except the very trivial code bases. Anything that used OCX and you were out of luck, except OCXs were very very common in classic VB development. People kept writing VB6 as long as it was practical (Windows 7) and then either moved on to greener pastures or left coding altogether as it was becoming impossible to use modern libraries anymore and the overall learning paradigm have shifted from books/forums into video tutorials and "modern" languages.
• hnaccountme 3y ago
  VB was mostly for IT departments to create small custom apps without having the full software engineering skill set. This was the time when software development started to be outsourced to the 3rd world. Most of the low level apps that were maintained in a companies IT department would have been outsourced easily. But the companies taking on these projects in the 3rd world would have used more complex development tools just to look and feel like they are doing complex work. I do not mean to suggest there are no complex software coming out from the 3rd world. But most of the outsourced projects are simple CRUD applications
• yoava 3y ago
  in one word - CSS. CSS has killed VB. How? when you need to build any application with custom graphics or UX, in VB you are gonna writes tons of lines of code, while using CSS you just write 2-3 declarations.
• marcus_holmes 3y ago
  I remember it as the push to C#. Microsoft had basically shat themselves about Java, and were pushing C# as its rival. VB.Net was a bit broken, there was lots of "you'll have to use the C# interface for that because the VB one isn't ready yet". Generally as developers we were pushed to C# and the writing was clearly on the wall that VB wasn't going to continue as is. The whole Microsoft stack was converging on C# and moving away from VB. And the replacement of COM with .Net has an impact. We had a whole ecosystem of COM (and DCOM) objects that worked well. .Net broke all of that, and didn't replace them for years. I don't think it was the move to OOP. VB4 introduced classes way back in '96 (iirc), and by VB6 everything was objects. It was a little more complicated for newbies (I remember training junior devs in OOP in the early '00s), but once they got the hang of classes and instances it was plain sailing.
• osigurdson 3y ago
  VB is just C# with a syntax that would extremely unfamiliar to most programmers. Basic itself is no longer commonly used to teach coding so I can see why there would be little demand for such a language.
• zeehio 3y ago
  On Error Resume Next It never dies
• foxbee 3y ago
  I'm the co-founder of Budibase and we've spent the last 5 years building what we believe is a better, faster, open source replacement for VB. Check it out: [1] https://budibase.com https://budibase.com
• vparikh 3y ago
  Microsoft killed VB for one very simple reason: They were terrified of Java and the JVM that went along with it, as it would make their cash cow - Windows possibly redundant. They basically switched everything to .Net and the CLR. Also, you are looking at VB through rose tinted glasses. VB was a terrible system to build products on: - Poor language. BASIC is not, as implemented by VB, a production level language. I am sure folks will argue that point, but I will stand by it. - The component model was terrible - you had to drop in to C and use OLE/DCOM to create components for it. A VB dev couldn't create components directly in VB. - DLL HELL. Shipping VB code was a nightmare. Delphi was an answer to all of this - but Microsoft killed that too by stealing Anders Hejlsberg, whow went on to create the .Net frameworks, implementing many of the Delphi innovations in a Microsoft ecosystem.
• bitwize 3y ago
  Thankfully VB's "Unix philosophy" counterpart -- Tcl/Tk -- lives on. I have always found it faster to go from zero to GUI by laying it out declaratively in Tcl/Tk than by rat wrestling in VB -- and the results look better. With the Snit object system (part of the popular Tcllib), building components out of the basic widgets becomes a breeze. The problem with VB and with other "business languages" going back to COBOL is that the skill ceiling is low. Not as low as this decade's no-code craze, but tools like that make the easy bits easier and the hard bits asymptotically approach impossible -- and as projects mature, hard bits dominate the lifecycle. Tcl has an absurdly high skill ceiling but it has problems of its own. You can do crazy Lisp-style metaprogramming, but the semantics are as if designed by a Lovecraftian madman who'd been exposed to dread Cthulhu. So nothing is perfect but there are ways to feel as productive as VB, even today.
• deostroll 3y ago
  The language died because of Microsoft tried to woo java developers into using the .net ecosystem. So whenever the CLR got more features, C# (rather than VB) started supporting them more readily. Experience wise, it looked more elegant in c# than in vb. VB originally wasn't thought of as an OOP language. But through vb.net when that paradigm was "imported", the language lost its charm. Further more, web development took flight. No one was interested to build desktop applications anymore. Also I wouldn't say the influx of java developers into the .net ecosystem was that considerable. (Or for that matter other platform developers like python, delphi). It was definitely slow during the 2002s. Because the java ecosystem had achieved code-once-and-run-any-where paradigm. You could write desktop applications developed on windows, on, linux machines. From a business POV why would application developers "want" a different ecosystem to achieve this? All this sort of eventually killed classic VB. PS: you should also ask bing ai this question. :)
• iamnotsure 3y ago
  No stickers.
• ablackhole 3y ago
  I'm only half way thru one good post after another. But I don't see many posts about: can VB be extended, expanded, developed? Truly, I am far behind most, and currently I am working on an app, in Excel, that helps the voiceless (like me), speak. I worked w/ Access VB for a short while, but, it, at the very least, needs Sql Server. Also, there are issues with threading, but is that the end of it? Since VB is a high level environment, speed is an issue. I have not yet heard that Excel is really headed toward .net or any other framework, but I keep checking. If anyone at MS wants to appologize for the Ribbon, don't bother. I will never accept! But can VB, in some way, be fixed or rehabilitated or improved, or whatever? I do hope so, but I can be persuaded otherwise.
• thewrinklyninja 3y ago
  if you need to fill a RAD niche in your workflow. Pascal is still around with a nice IDE https://www.lazarus-ide.org/ https://www.lazarus-ide.org/
• ausare 3y ago
  "why hasn't someone come out with a solid replacement?" There are some companies/people keeping the torch burning but they're not as widely known, one such is Mercury which targets a whole host of platforms and is actually quite good - https://www.remobjects.com/elements/mercury/ https://www.remobjects.com/elements/mercury/ The problem is it feels a bit of a niche language now because MS basically forced people on to C# by not actively maintaining VB.NET which was the first hop for people coming from VB. Early in my career I did various conversion projects for corps from VB to VB.NET then eventually as that atrophied to C#.
• dangerface 3y ago
  > I would go so far as to say we've gone backwards in a big way. I would say you probably just don't remember how bad VB was. As a language its extremely simple and misses most of the modern niceties we take for granted, no iterators, no maps, no anonymous functions, no multidimensional arrays, no objects, the list goes on. I remember when I moved from Basic to VB the single most impressive thing was that it AUTOMATICALLY KNEW THE LINE NUMBERS! YOU DON'T EVEN HAVE TO WRITE THEM ON EVERY LINE! If you made a mistake IT COULD JUST TELL YOU THE ERROR, no more looking up codes on a table in the back of a book. Basic was never supposed to be good to use it was only ever supposed to be easy to learn.
• emrecoban 3y ago
  It's not only related to Visual Basic. It's an ecosystem. Some animals die, some animals born.
• JohnDeHope 3y ago
  My two cents: the web. It's not that VB died, it's that we stopped targeting the desktop for intranet line of business apps. It all went to the web. Deployment and support of web apps is an order of magnitude easier than thick clients, maybe two orders of magnitude easier. As an industry we never looked back.
• steve_slammin 3y ago
  As the 90s commercial goes, Why Ask Why? Celebrate good times
• scaradim 3y ago
  My company was using VB for developing test suites for some hardware in the 200Xs. It died for me when I've discovered Python and suggested to my management to switch existing test suites to Python.
• davejnewman 3y ago
  A few thoughts as I was a VBA developer at the time .net was released. 1. VB was deliberatly killed off by M$ in order to get .net going and the resulting vb.net was horrible to use. 2. C# was the new kid on the block and acted enough like C++ to not totally alienate C developers even though the library was terrible. 3. Security was becoming an issue as applications moved to the internet. Since VB and all the classic ASP tools used com they were deprecated in favor of .net runtimes. Meanwhile VBA was running many business solutions and supporting multi user applications, reporting applications. I developed many apps in Access and Excel that were business critical and are still in use today. IT management wanted these to be re written in .net and found it nearly impossible from a budget standpoint and those that were converted we slow and clunky since the Office interface from .net is slow. Last thought... VB was always the poor step child to fully compiled languages like C and C++. And VB developers were looked at poorly as undisciplined which many were. Looking at the online apps today where Java script is used with undeclared variables tells me that no one's cares about that anymore.
• resoluteteeth 3y ago
  C# with winforms in visual studio using the gui builder is basically the same experience as vb6 but better in every way. I'm honestly not sure why complaints about legacy vb6 being killed tend to overlook this, but I think it's because there are lots of people who have fond memories of vb6 but have simply never tried c# with winforms. If you want that experience, you can literally get it right now as long as you're ok making desktop apps that will only run on windows and don't mind that it may look somewhat out of place among more recent windows apps using WPF and its successors. The real question then isn't why microsoft "abandoned" visual basic (they replaced it with something that is strictly better), but why people aren't using winforms or something similar in 2023. I think that's because 1) it isn't cross platform and 2) people have lots of other requirements that are difficult in winforms. Aside from being cross-platform, I guess the winforms api requires you to manage a lot of stuff like data bindings by hand that people are used to having work automatically. People also want good support for various monitor sizes, although .net winforms is actually much better about that than vb6 because it has pretty decent layout controls so you don't have to write code to handle resizes to the same extent. The fact is, the vb6 gui builder worked best if you just ignored resizing and only had to worry about one screen resolution, and even though .net winforms is better about that, it's still fairly complicated to use the layout controls to handle resizing properly I think there was actually a project that was attempting to make a winforms-style api for Avalonia which would actually fix some of the problems including cross-platform support (including mobile; avalonia is pretty slick and it's unfortunate that microsoft hasn't just hired the people making it rather than focusing on stuff like winui and maui), but I think it stalled because among people making desktop windows applications there simply isn't that much interest in using a winforms style api in 2023.
• ecef9-8c0f-4374 3y ago
  I don't know how to tie this in. Gambas is a Visual Basic dialect for Linux Linux and FreeBSD/BSD. It gives me the same vibes as my early VB experiences and I think I deserves more love.
• popashack 3y ago
  I totally agree. VB 1-6 was an interesting ride. Abolishing VB6 was a travesty. Once upon a time we had true RAD code, it was VB6. I do not code seriously much anymore, but when I do I miss the simplicity of fixing problems and not worrying about the code as much.
• qingcharles 3y ago
  Unpopular opinion: VB.NET was superior to C#, especially in code-readability. I've coded in dozens of languages, including a long spell as a video game developer writing x86 and C++. VB.NET was my favourite development language and I wrote some insanely complicated code in it.
• RonanOD 3y ago
  This is fascinating to me. I am a software developer of many years and a novelist in more recent years. (See https://ronanodriscoll.com/work https://ronanodriscoll.com/work) My latest book is a novel about the life of a software developer starting with BASIC on the Commodore 64 in the Eighties up to today. One of the main ideas is how (unlike previous professions), a programmer who only writes Basic can hardly last one generation. The novel is tentatively titled "BASIC Instinct: A Coding Novel". The book is to be published by Moose House press next year and I am looking to generate interest among the developer community. I hope people who comment on this thread find this interesting. Please don't hesitate to contact me if you do, or have ideas of other online communities to share with. Thank you.
• deweywsu 3y ago
  Nothing compared then or since to VB 6's ease of layout and GUI-centered approach. It was a language that was easy to use and WAY less complicated than C#. To me, complicated is a huge drawback. Give me just enough tools to make something that works. VB6 was absolutely fantastic for prototyping. I have absolutely no need for 200 methods for every expression that I have to go lookup every time (this is why IntelliSense even exists), having to think about bullshit like "syntactic sugar", aka "the only way to do something because it's otherwise too hard to remember", which to be fair started with javascript frameworks, but applies equally well to .NET. The whole dot paradigm took a group of people who were very comfortable with a language and tried to turn their brains inside out. Ex: x.ToString doesn't have the same intuitive recognition as Str(x), nor can Str(x) be as easily muddled together with 3 other methods. Call it simple and meaningless, but .NET is profuse with these turnarounds, and they required people to re-learn everything, even the simple stuff. .NET adds layers of complexity by enabling super-spiffy compact writing of multiple operations with complex operators all on the same line that is far too easy to get lost in and that frankly, is unnecessary. I'm talking about things like delegates, lambda expressions, extension methods, and async/await. These are cute if you're super nerdy, but for most of the rest of the world they take something that was easy to use and contort it into an unrecognizable mess. VB6 was just complex enough and graphics-centered and they moved it to a hugely overly complex and language-centered model. It made no sense to me. Of course, everyone who thought "real" programming should be harder embraced C# like it was manna from God, and this by and large is the thinking that killed VB6. It was a complete paradigm shift in the wrong direction for visual thinkers.