8 ms·

Their greatest mistake(s) were the removal of visual basic 6 line of products and windows 10. Visual basic 6 is my first programming language and is probably s

Their greatest mistake(s) were the removal of visual basic 6 line of products and windows 10. Visual basic 6 is my first programming language and is probably still my favourite. The problem with lua and python and most other "beginner friendly" languages is that it is hard to do anything useful when u are just starting other than printing hello world to terminal. My intro to vb6 was creating a simple calculator, it was amazing knowing that i could create an application simply by dragging and dropping some elements and writing some code. I never had to worry about things like gtk bindings and makefiles etc. The earlier version of visual studio started up in less then a second and I never experienced any lag. The killer feature was probably the combination of both an just-in-time interpretator and a full-blown compiler. I could simply click play and the app would run, if i need an exe, it would also export one. This feature put most modern "repl-based languages" and "test-driven development" to shame. A lot of people complain that vb 6 is not object-orientated enough, but remember, C is not object-orientated either, and it still tops the tiobe programming list. Windows is sorely in need of an Rapid application development framework. Although vb6 still installs on windows 7, a lot of its features are broken. I really miss having an IDE that doesnt get in your way, starts up quickly, and allows you to get things done fast. The argument that vb6 encourages bad programming practices etc. is not really that valid when the user is not an professional programmer. After all, would you rather teach your kids to code by teaching him about build tools and commandlines and gui bindings or would you simply give them an environment where they can create whatever they want in a fuss-free way? Now, lets just hope that microsoft isnt stupid enough to nerf asp.net web forms.......

gurkendoktor 12y ago
I was a huge fan of Delphi 5 at the time, and hoped it would win over VB6 (I guess it's a Coke/Pepsi thing). Now I'm in the same boat as you, because it seems both Delphi and its competitor, VB, have lost. I'm not even sure if there are any winners. I wish someone would build a robust OS & GUI toolkit and ship it with developer tools...
- Nitramp 12y ago
  > I wish someone would build a robust OS & GUI toolkit and ship it with developer tools... I think that's the web. The development that used to happen in VB6 & Delphi simply has migrated there, desktop apps from that segment are dead.
  - david927 12y ago
    I think you're right, and it's a huge indictment. The web, as an application platform, is worse than VB ever was. Think about that for a moment: We've regressed from VB. The usual tradeoff is: easy to write, hard to extend and maintain. But the web is hard to write and hard to extend/maintain. We have some of the smartest people in the world in our industry, and evidently we're all idiots.
    - Immortalin 12y ago
      I concur, the combination of css + js + html is an nightmare especially if you are are trying to design a simple database-backed website for your startup. Webforms might have been hard to maintain for some, but at least it worked well. There was no need to figure out all the background stuff if you are not a professional developer. If I need a fancier website based on mvc, I would have hired a fullstack django developer instead.
      - demallien 12y ago
        Yup, and if you are trying to do the full stack, you had better toss in some node.js or Ruby on Rails, plus SQL. Web development is really hard for non-developers to grok. I keep thinking back to an Access application that I threw together in a couple of days, back in the 90s for managing a team of about 40 technicians. It was being used for task tracking, and had some wiki-like features as well. When I started that project I knew nothing about Access or VB, and yet in two days I had a bunch of forms and tables that allowed managers to get a quick feel for what their staff were up to. The thing ran over the LAN, and could handle 10 simultaneous connections without any dramas. If I were to try the same thing in the web world, I might lose myself in getting just one table view working correctly for a week. Getting an http server configured and up and running, and talking to a db server would be at least two days. And there would be many potential roadblocks just waiting to trip me up along the way. These days, rather than dealing with that mess, many companies just go for an off-the-shelf hosted solution that sort of fits their needs, such as Basecamp, or Jira, or Igloo. The existence of these products is a sign that we've gone off in the wrong direction somewhere - the sorts of products they make are very similar to that online apps you could make with Access 20 years ago.
300bps 12y ago
It is still fairly early in the morning for me on a Saturday, so please excuse me if I missed that your comment was sarcasm. I still have an MCSD in VB6 and programmed millions of lines of code in it but honestly I haven't used it in about a decade and would never consider using it again. ASP.NET WinForms are just as obsolete in my book. I programmed dozens of applications using it but I would never consider using it today for modern web development. I still use Microsoft development tools. C# and ASP.NET MVC are great, modern technologies that allow me to make stable and scalable web applications very rapidly. The modern versions of Visual Studio fulfill all the things you said you liked about VB6 and are otherwise incomparably superior.
- Immortalin 12y ago
  http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/magazine/jj133828.aspx http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/magazine/jj133828.aspx
- damian2000 12y ago
  Same here, used VB6 in the past and pushed it to its limits, then .NET came along and ate its lunch, far superior in all ways, including speed of development.
thomasahle 12y ago
Young programmers today tend to start with the Javascript family. There have probably never been languages with the same visual tools built in, rapidness of feedback and ease of sharing with friends.
- Immortalin 12y ago
  Not true, I am a young programmer and I learned vb6 as my first language. It ran perfectly well on windows xp.
  - alex_hitchins 12y ago
    Out of interest, why did you choose vb6? I'd have thought you would need to go out your way to learn such an old platform.
    - deleted 12y ago
      [deleted]
    - Immortalin 12y ago
      My dad wasn't much of a programmer, he was a businessman. he had an old copy of vb6 that worked perfectly well and that was my first exposure to programming. Because of that, most other languages with their non-existent gui frameworks and messy IDEs seemed inferior in comparison as getting anything useful done on them was a pain. The jit interpretation allowed me to test my code without having to wait for compilation, at the same time, I can also export it as an compiled executable. Compiled vb is much faster than languages such as Python and Ruby that supposedly allow you to code fast. The current generation of .Net languages take ages to compile making test-driven development a huge pain sometimes.
  - deleted 12y ago
    [deleted]
  - rgbrenner 12y ago
    VB6 (the last release of VB) is 16 years old, and has been unsupported for 6 years. Even if it was your first language, you can't possibly be a typical new programmer.
ZanyProgrammer 12y ago
I hear ya about VB6, I think that making it incompatible with VB.Net was a mistake. But ASP.NET webforms? Ugh. I maintain a slightly older website using webforms, and it feels like I'm in the web development dark ages. Its a literal ghetto of tech that is used no where else.
- WorldWideWayne 12y ago
  Have you ever been to corporate america? ASP.NET webforms is used heavily everywhere including but definitely not limited to marketing agencies, the financial sector (investment and banking down on through collection agencies), healthcare, call centers, etc etc etc. If you approach a lot of those places and show them something like AngularJS they'll be like "where are all of the high-level tags and rich components that I can just drag and drop"? And then you'll realize that you're not actually in the ghetto. There's a reason that webforms didn't die when Microsoft introduced MVC, but instead they started bringing MVC features into webforms because so many people use it.
  - ZanyProgrammer 12y ago
    Yes I work for a stereotypical .Net shop. Just because it's ubiquitous in the Enterprise doesn't mean it's not crap. I generally love MSFTs dev tools, but web forms are still a ghetto compared to MVC.
    - wernercd 12y ago
      "Just because it's ubiquitous in the Enterprise doesn't mean it's not crap." This. Look at Java, and the bloated mess it has become. Look at XML and the bloated mess it is. Popular doesn't mean it's good. There are plenty of individuals at the top that don't know cisco from crisco.
    - WorldWideWayne 12y ago
      Sure, but it's crap that gets those Enterprises from A to B. What I want to know is, what better crap is there that offers the ease of use that webforms does? If there's nothing better then this is the best crap we have. It's kind of like how gas-guzzling, environment-ruining automobiles in general are crappy, but what practical alternatives exist that actually cover all of the use cases?
albertzeyer 12y ago
Note that Lazarus (http://www.lazarus.freepascal.org/ http://www.lazarus.freepascal.org/) (Delphi clone, based on Free Pascal) works today and is somewhat like that. And it's Open Source and cross-platform (works on Windows, Linux, MacOSX). But maybe it's still not simple enough. Also, Object Pascal is probably harder to learn than VB6, esp for a beginner. I also started mostly with VB6 and still somewhat miss it... Nowadays I mostly use C++ and Python on Linux or MacOSX and have tried many many other languages in the meanwhile. But I still miss VB6 somehow.
MichaelGG 12y ago
I've personally watched an essentially-non-programmer take VB.NET, drag-n-drop, write some event handlers, and have a functioning little app. So while VB6's IDE is faster than the ".NET" Visual Studios, most of your other complaints are really not valid.
- UnoriginalGuy 12y ago
  Yeah the complaint is ridiculous and this coming from someone who learnt on VB 6. VB 6's IDE cost $500+ at the time and even getting the education edition was a huge PITA (it was HEAVILY pirated by students). VB.net and C# (and F#) are free [legal] downloads from the internet and both just as capable as VB6 was back in the day (the things Visual Studio Pro and above add aren't really relevant to beginners, except the testing framework perhaps). Plus back in the day I found VB 6 quite limiting. For 101 level stuff it is plenty fine, but once you want to go beyond simple applications (e.g. games) you're left almost fighting the language and libraries itself. With C# in particular, while it is certainly slower than Go/C/C++/D/etc, that's really the only major limitation. You can definitely access much more of Windows' API infrastructure, it supports unsafe code, the .Net framework is more comprehensive, and the language features are extremely modern (F# more so). There really is no limits except execution speed. Honestly kids today are extremely lucky. I would have killed to be learning on C# back in my day. Fuck VB 6.
  - Locke1689 12y ago
    "With C# in particular, while it is certainly slower than Go" Source? C# should be much faster than Go.
  - MikeTV 12y ago
    As a counterpoint, since doing anything advanced in VB6 (game-making-wise - that's what I learned it for) required low-level calls to GDI, OpenGL, or DirectX libraries, I feel I obtained a better picture of how the OS operates at that level than if I had started on C#. C#'s nicer, for sure, but if you're just doing it to learn how computers work anyway...
  - raverbashing 12y ago
sauere 12y ago
When i talk to people who want to start programming, especially young high school kids i often hear that they want to stay flexible. Flexible both in the platform/stack they are working with and flexible in what they can do with the language and toolset. VB6 offered none of this.
chj 12y ago
I don't really miss vb6 as a language, but its IDE is so pleasant to use, no matter you're a beginner or a seasoned programmer.
plorg 12y ago
My first programming experience was in VB6. A local college had a week-long camp for middle-school kids to learn various things. A few of my friends and I took the programming unit as one of our two choices, and they taught VB6 (this was probably about 1999). We came back home with source code and executables, but missing the VB6 runtime and disappointed that we couldn't continue working on our programs. We even made screensavers! Anyways, one of my friends' uncles gave that friend a copy of VB6 that he pirated from the company he worked at. We made some other programs, but I haven't looked at them for a long time. Recently I found back the source code, but was disappointed to find that it could not be opened in VB.NET. Furthermore, it's stored mostly in binary files, so I can't even read much of the code. It's probably for the best though - the code we wrote is almost certainly quite ugly and hacky, and I could certainly write the same programs much better today.
jimbokun 12y ago
You may have stumbled upon a strategic product category: VB6 like development tools compiling to iOS Android and web, backed by Office, Azure and other Microsoft software and services. Has the potential to get businessesand developers back onto the Microsoft platforms.
marktolson 12y ago
I used to share similar feelings when VB.Net was first introduced. I couldn't believe there was no VB 7 and Visual Studio .Net was the official replacement. Having worked with .Net, winforms, MVC, webforms etc for over 10 years now, there is absolutely no comparison between the latest versions of Visual Studio and the archaic tools from VB 6 days. Yes, VB 6 starts faster, but that's pretty much where the pros end these days.

gurkendoktor 12y ago

I was a huge fan of Delphi 5 at the time, and hoped it would win over VB6 (I guess it's a Coke/Pepsi thing). Now I'm in the same boat as you, because it seems both Delphi and its competitor, VB, have lost. I'm not even sure if there are any winners. I wish someone would build a robust OS & GUI toolkit and ship it with developer tools...

Nitramp 12y ago
> I wish someone would build a robust OS & GUI toolkit and ship it with developer tools... I think that's the web. The development that used to happen in VB6 & Delphi simply has migrated there, desktop apps from that segment are dead.
- david927 12y ago
  I think you're right, and it's a huge indictment. The web, as an application platform, is worse than VB ever was. Think about that for a moment: We've regressed from VB. The usual tradeoff is: easy to write, hard to extend and maintain. But the web is hard to write and hard to extend/maintain. We have some of the smartest people in the world in our industry, and evidently we're all idiots.
  - Immortalin 12y ago
    I concur, the combination of css + js + html is an nightmare especially if you are are trying to design a simple database-backed website for your startup. Webforms might have been hard to maintain for some, but at least it worked well. There was no need to figure out all the background stuff if you are not a professional developer. If I need a fancier website based on mvc, I would have hired a fullstack django developer instead.
    - demallien 12y ago
      Yup, and if you are trying to do the full stack, you had better toss in some node.js or Ruby on Rails, plus SQL. Web development is really hard for non-developers to grok. I keep thinking back to an Access application that I threw together in a couple of days, back in the 90s for managing a team of about 40 technicians. It was being used for task tracking, and had some wiki-like features as well. When I started that project I knew nothing about Access or VB, and yet in two days I had a bunch of forms and tables that allowed managers to get a quick feel for what their staff were up to. The thing ran over the LAN, and could handle 10 simultaneous connections without any dramas. If I were to try the same thing in the web world, I might lose myself in getting just one table view working correctly for a week. Getting an http server configured and up and running, and talking to a db server would be at least two days. And there would be many potential roadblocks just waiting to trip me up along the way. These days, rather than dealing with that mess, many companies just go for an off-the-shelf hosted solution that sort of fits their needs, such as Basecamp, or Jira, or Igloo. The existence of these products is a sign that we've gone off in the wrong direction somewhere - the sorts of products they make are very similar to that online apps you could make with Access 20 years ago.

300bps 12y ago

It is still fairly early in the morning for me on a Saturday, so please excuse me if I missed that your comment was sarcasm. I still have an MCSD in VB6 and programmed millions of lines of code in it but honestly I haven't used it in about a decade and would never consider using it again. ASP.NET WinForms are just as obsolete in my book. I programmed dozens of applications using it but I would never consider using it today for modern web development. I still use Microsoft development tools. C# and ASP.NET MVC are great, modern technologies that allow me to make stable and scalable web applications very rapidly. The modern versions of Visual Studio fulfill all the things you said you liked about VB6 and are otherwise incomparably superior.

Immortalin 12y ago
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/magazine/jj133828.aspx http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/magazine/jj133828.aspx
damian2000 12y ago
Same here, used VB6 in the past and pushed it to its limits, then .NET came along and ate its lunch, far superior in all ways, including speed of development.

thomasahle 12y ago

Young programmers today tend to start with the Javascript family. There have probably never been languages with the same visual tools built in, rapidness of feedback and ease of sharing with friends.

Immortalin 12y ago
Not true, I am a young programmer and I learned vb6 as my first language. It ran perfectly well on windows xp.
- alex_hitchins 12y ago
  Out of interest, why did you choose vb6? I'd have thought you would need to go out your way to learn such an old platform.
  - deleted 12y ago
    [deleted]
  - Immortalin 12y ago
    My dad wasn't much of a programmer, he was a businessman. he had an old copy of vb6 that worked perfectly well and that was my first exposure to programming. Because of that, most other languages with their non-existent gui frameworks and messy IDEs seemed inferior in comparison as getting anything useful done on them was a pain. The jit interpretation allowed me to test my code without having to wait for compilation, at the same time, I can also export it as an compiled executable. Compiled vb is much faster than languages such as Python and Ruby that supposedly allow you to code fast. The current generation of .Net languages take ages to compile making test-driven development a huge pain sometimes.
- deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]
- rgbrenner 12y ago
  VB6 (the last release of VB) is 16 years old, and has been unsupported for 6 years. Even if it was your first language, you can't possibly be a typical new programmer.

ZanyProgrammer 12y ago

I hear ya about VB6, I think that making it incompatible with VB.Net was a mistake. But ASP.NET webforms? Ugh. I maintain a slightly older website using webforms, and it feels like I'm in the web development dark ages. Its a literal ghetto of tech that is used no where else.

WorldWideWayne 12y ago
Have you ever been to corporate america? ASP.NET webforms is used heavily everywhere including but definitely not limited to marketing agencies, the financial sector (investment and banking down on through collection agencies), healthcare, call centers, etc etc etc. If you approach a lot of those places and show them something like AngularJS they'll be like "where are all of the high-level tags and rich components that I can just drag and drop"? And then you'll realize that you're not actually in the ghetto. There's a reason that webforms didn't die when Microsoft introduced MVC, but instead they started bringing MVC features into webforms because so many people use it.
- ZanyProgrammer 12y ago
  Yes I work for a stereotypical .Net shop. Just because it's ubiquitous in the Enterprise doesn't mean it's not crap. I generally love MSFTs dev tools, but web forms are still a ghetto compared to MVC.
  - wernercd 12y ago
    "Just because it's ubiquitous in the Enterprise doesn't mean it's not crap." This. Look at Java, and the bloated mess it has become. Look at XML and the bloated mess it is. Popular doesn't mean it's good. There are plenty of individuals at the top that don't know cisco from crisco.
  - WorldWideWayne 12y ago
    Sure, but it's crap that gets those Enterprises from A to B. What I want to know is, what better crap is there that offers the ease of use that webforms does? If there's nothing better then this is the best crap we have. It's kind of like how gas-guzzling, environment-ruining automobiles in general are crappy, but what practical alternatives exist that actually cover all of the use cases?

albertzeyer 12y ago

Note that Lazarus (http://www.lazarus.freepascal.org/ http://www.lazarus.freepascal.org/) (Delphi clone, based on Free Pascal) works today and is somewhat like that. And it's Open Source and cross-platform (works on Windows, Linux, MacOSX). But maybe it's still not simple enough. Also, Object Pascal is probably harder to learn than VB6, esp for a beginner. I also started mostly with VB6 and still somewhat miss it... Nowadays I mostly use C++ and Python on Linux or MacOSX and have tried many many other languages in the meanwhile. But I still miss VB6 somehow.

MichaelGG 12y ago

I've personally watched an essentially-non-programmer take VB.NET, drag-n-drop, write some event handlers, and have a functioning little app. So while VB6's IDE is faster than the ".NET" Visual Studios, most of your other complaints are really not valid.

UnoriginalGuy 12y ago
Yeah the complaint is ridiculous and this coming from someone who learnt on VB 6. VB 6's IDE cost $500+ at the time and even getting the education edition was a huge PITA (it was HEAVILY pirated by students). VB.net and C# (and F#) are free [legal] downloads from the internet and both just as capable as VB6 was back in the day (the things Visual Studio Pro and above add aren't really relevant to beginners, except the testing framework perhaps). Plus back in the day I found VB 6 quite limiting. For 101 level stuff it is plenty fine, but once you want to go beyond simple applications (e.g. games) you're left almost fighting the language and libraries itself. With C# in particular, while it is certainly slower than Go/C/C++/D/etc, that's really the only major limitation. You can definitely access much more of Windows' API infrastructure, it supports unsafe code, the .Net framework is more comprehensive, and the language features are extremely modern (F# more so). There really is no limits except execution speed. Honestly kids today are extremely lucky. I would have killed to be learning on C# back in my day. Fuck VB 6.
- Locke1689 12y ago
  "With C# in particular, while it is certainly slower than Go" Source? C# should be much faster than Go.
- MikeTV 12y ago
  As a counterpoint, since doing anything advanced in VB6 (game-making-wise - that's what I learned it for) required low-level calls to GDI, OpenGL, or DirectX libraries, I feel I obtained a better picture of how the OS operates at that level than if I had started on C#. C#'s nicer, for sure, but if you're just doing it to learn how computers work anyway...
- raverbashing 12y ago

sauere 12y ago

When i talk to people who want to start programming, especially young high school kids i often hear that they want to stay flexible. Flexible both in the platform/stack they are working with and flexible in what they can do with the language and toolset. VB6 offered none of this.

chj 12y ago

I don't really miss vb6 as a language, but its IDE is so pleasant to use, no matter you're a beginner or a seasoned programmer.

plorg 12y ago

My first programming experience was in VB6. A local college had a week-long camp for middle-school kids to learn various things. A few of my friends and I took the programming unit as one of our two choices, and they taught VB6 (this was probably about 1999). We came back home with source code and executables, but missing the VB6 runtime and disappointed that we couldn't continue working on our programs. We even made screensavers! Anyways, one of my friends' uncles gave that friend a copy of VB6 that he pirated from the company he worked at. We made some other programs, but I haven't looked at them for a long time. Recently I found back the source code, but was disappointed to find that it could not be opened in VB.NET. Furthermore, it's stored mostly in binary files, so I can't even read much of the code. It's probably for the best though - the code we wrote is almost certainly quite ugly and hacky, and I could certainly write the same programs much better today.

jimbokun 12y ago

You may have stumbled upon a strategic product category: VB6 like development tools compiling to iOS Android and web, backed by Office, Azure and other Microsoft software and services. Has the potential to get businessesand developers back onto the Microsoft platforms.

marktolson 12y ago

I used to share similar feelings when VB.Net was first introduced. I couldn't believe there was no VB 7 and Visual Studio .Net was the official replacement. Having worked with .Net, winforms, MVC, webforms etc for over 10 years now, there is absolutely no comparison between the latest versions of Visual Studio and the archaic tools from VB 6 days. Yes, VB 6 starts faster, but that's pretty much where the pros end these days.