
The Rise and Fall of Visual Basic - chwolfe
https://medium.com/young-coder/the-rise-and-fall-of-visual-basic-f422252349a6
======
gus_massa
I'll copy one of my recent comments with some minor changes:

I still sometimes program in Classic VB, (aka VB6). Each year it is more
difficult to install the IDE, but the runtime is still installed by default.

It is incredible easy to build a nice one screen application with not very a
very complicated background logic. Normal people like a nice graphical
interface with a few buttons, and with Classic VB you can create them very
easily and iterate and customize the form.

My last big problem was that it doesn't have a build in sort function, so you
can use a n^2 sort or write a good sorting function by hand :( . When the
logic start to be not so easy, there begin to apear problems.

\--

About the article: I agree with most of it.

> _Also on the big side: There was no more edit-and-continue feature._

I still miss that when I program in other languages. It kills so many (all!)
optimizations possibilities, but it's extremely handy.

> _VB.Fred and the .NET Solution_

I call it VB# or VB#.Net instead of VB.Fred.

~~~
smhenderson
The first money I made using a computer was writing simple business automation
apps in VB, first 5 and for a short while 6. I also dabbled in Access Basic
and then VBA when all the office apps standardized on it instead of each
having their own flavor.

VB was great like you said until you needed to do something difficult. I
remember Bruce McKinny’s Hardcore Visual Basic book being my best friend for a
little while. It thought me I could do the hard stuff in C, make a DLL and
drop that into my VB project.

Bruce had a saying, VB makes 95% of the job easy and the other 5% impossible.

~~~
jeffFrom18F
I was going to make a reference to "Hardcore Visual Basic" but you beat me to
it. Fantastic book, it's hard to find a tech book that is that useful and fun
at the same time.

My first job started out with mostly Visual Basic 6. One of the modules
written in VC++ by a bunch of guys who were looking to get that on their
resume (they had since departed). It probably should have just been in VB as
well and was always a nightmare to debug and enhance.

Once .net was prominent we mostly moved to C#. There didn't seem to be much of
a reason to go with VB.Net, C# seemed more "legitimate" and without the
hassles of Visual C++/MFC.

Decades later and I still find myself writing an Excel macro in VBA now and
then but I've largely moved on.

------
jasode
_> And though historians love to talk about the visual part of Visual Basic,
its signature ability had nothing to do with graphical widgets. Instead, VB
became famous for a legendary feature called edit-and-continue, which allowed
developers to run their programs, find problems, fix them, and then keep going
with the new code._

I agree that Edit-&-Continue was a nice debugging feature but I disagree that
it was the main draw to VB. The main attraction to VB really was the easy-to-
use _graphical widgets_ which was exposed to the programmer via an abstraction
called "windows forms".

If one takes a look at a 1990s era Win32 "hello world" app[0] written in raw C
Language, it has tons of complicated boilerplate. Lots of complexity with
CreateWindow(param1, param2, etc, param11), GetMessage() loop, WndProc()
callback. The Win32 HelloWorld example doesn't even handle a click event. One
would have to add a switch case statement for the "WM_LBUTTONDOWN" message.

The VB "winforms" IDE eliminated all that and let a programmer "drag & drop"
UI elements onto a "form" and put code on a "click" event. It was a clever
simplification of raw Win32 API calls for business-oriented user interfaces.
In the ~1991 era, the winforms abstraction empowered a bunch of 1980s 4GL
programmers (e.g. dBase, Clipper, Foxpro) and business language programmers
(e.g. COBOL) to immediately be productive writing apps for Windows -- without
the steep learning curve of C/C++ and the raw Win32 API.

A lot of VB programmers I knew were not even aware of Edit&Continue but they
nevertheless were able to drag a command button from the UI toolbox and add
code to the button_click() event.

Another VB feature that I believe was more utilized than Edit&Continue was the
_VBX components ecosystem_. Lots of programmers would buy add-on VBX widgets
from various companies to enhance the UI such as calendar date picker,
datagrids, charts & graphs, etc.

[0]
[http://www.prowaretech.com/Computer/Windows/WinApiHello](http://www.prowaretech.com/Computer/Windows/WinApiHello)

~~~
pvg
_[...]VBX components ecosystem. Lots of programmers would buy add-on VBX
widgets from various companies to enhance the UI such as calendar date picker,
datagrids, charts & graphs, etc_

There was a lot of optimism at the time about how much of the more mundane
software development would become the assembly pre-defined components and
there'd be marketplaces of components. That's mostly not how things worked out
but they did, for a while, for VBX. Seems like a bigger, more startling
achievement than 'Edit & Continue' to me as well.

~~~
repolfx
How did that vision not work out? Seems pretty on the money to me - only
difference between then and now is that we ship components as JARs or
node_modules etc, and the components are mostly free and open source vs
proprietary products.

The basic vision that mundane programming would become the assembly of pre-
built components has worked out astonishingly well though, to the extent that
now many developers actually _get upset_ if they're asked to write a program
in an interview that _isn 't_ an assembly of pre-built components. They go on
HN or reddit and post diatribes about how they should be asked to do "real"
work, instead of coding up things they can just grab a component off github to
do.

~~~
pvg
Arbitrary chunks of source or object code are not 'components' in a usefully
meaningful way. You're not firing up Reactant IDE and making things out of
Enterprise Java Beans and ACME WebWidgets.

------
EdgarVerona
Yet another interesting benefit of/interesting feature of VB is that it was
the Python of its day in terms of the "there's a library to do that" factor.
Not only was it easy to pick up, but (while not built-in like Python) it had
access to thousands and thousands of easy to install and easy to use ActiveX
libraries. There was almost always an ActiveX Library to suit your needs,
ready to literally drop into the WYSIWYG editor and use.

That _combined_ with the easy to use WYSIWYG editor and the edit and continue
functionality were, to me, what made it such an amazingly useful language for
creating quick utilities or small programs. It was truly a "Rapid Application
Development" language.

I also saw some nightmares in my days, though I don't blame VB as much as the
people who created the app. The most notable one was a document management
system that I'd been asked to port from VB3 to VB6 (so that it could run on
win32 among other reasons) and to turn the system from a batch system for
document processing facilities into a desktop DMS for home use. I will never
forget when I opened up the project and there were 60 some-odd "forms" in it,
and when I opened any one of them up not a single one defined a variable. They
all - every last one - was defined as a global variable in a single
globals.bas file. There were _thousands_ of global variables. Every single one
in the entire application declared there, and edited at will in any of the
myriad forms wherever they fancied. My first task became "untangle the global
variable mess."

------
pjmlp
I have done a couple of projects during the last years at a few life sciences
companies part of Fortune 500.

Their researchers aren't using R, Python or even eyeing on Julia.

They use Excel with VB macros and those skillful enough, get IT to install
them Visual Studio Professional and carry on using VB.NET.

Also remember that VB.NET, contrary to F#, enjoys equal footing with C# across
all .NET deployment scenarios and Visual Studio graphical tooling.

~~~
graycat
As I recall, Kernighan and Ritchie in _The C Programming Language_ admitted
that C had "idiosyncratic syntax" (with lots of results on Google and I'll
save time by not searching the book itself). Then C++ used that, and C#
borrowed some of it.

The .NET version of Visual Basic, VB.NET, seems to be about as good as C# for
getting at the .NET Framework and taking advantage of the "common language
runtime" (CLR) but with more traditional syntax (Kemeny, Kurtz Basic, Algol,
Fortran, Pascal, PL/I, etc.) easier to teach, learn, read, write, and debug.
So, shock, I wrote the code for my startup in VB.NET! But, IIRC, there's a
translator to convert at least one way between C# and VB.NET!

~~~
Meph504
I've used this a number of times, it has its limitations and faults, but it's
usually pretty good for sharing C# code example to a vb. Net dev
[http://converter.telerik.com/](http://converter.telerik.com/)

~~~
graycat
Many thanks! Gee, it claims to work both ways,

C# <\--> VB

------
gumby
> Instead, VB became famous for a legendary feature called edit-and-continue,
> which allowed developers to run their programs, find problems, fix them, and
> then keep going with the new code. This was a sharp difference from almost
> every other programming environment known to humanity, which force
> developers to recompile their work and start over after every change.

Umm, _cough_ Lisp environments from the 1960s, Lispms, Smalltalk etc...

~~~
mruts
I wouldn’t expect a VB programmer to really know anything about the higher
forms of computing. Maybe I’m being a little harsh though.

------
ryanmarsh
At great risk to my HN karma I’m gonna share from the heart.

VB was the pinnacle of software development.

Nothing about it was perfect, except it was easy for anyone to build anything.
I saw everything from kids making shareware to phd’s building multi-hundred-
million dollar ERP systems.

A lot of nice-enough and useful software was built in VB that remained useful
and editable over long lifetimes.

I pine for something like that in the mobile or web worlds. Everything else
I’ve tried is an absolute mess in comparison.

~~~
crispinb
> _I pine for something like that in the mobile or web worlds_

A recentish episode of a python podcast ([https://www.pythonpodcast.com/anvil-
web-application-developm...](https://www.pythonpodcast.com/anvil-web-
application-development-episode-215/)) had an interview with one of the
founders of Anvil ([https://anvil.works/](https://anvil.works/)). He claimed
VB & Delphi as significant inspirations for their web app platform (using
python for front & back ends, with a drag/drop GUI builder).

Might be worth a look, if only for curiosity's sake.

------
ravenstine
Anyone wanting to relive the glory of VB but on a modern system can use
Gambas:

[http://gambas.sourceforge.net/en/main.html](http://gambas.sourceforge.net/en/main.html)

~~~
Doubl
Vb6 is still out there being developed with, on Windows 10. Active community
at vbforums

------
kerng
Open sourcing the original VB6 would be an incredible move by Microsoft.

Something tells me that this could be a quite successful community project.
Possibly for building cross platform apps for phones.

I like how we are at least talking again about Visual Basic recently - maybe
it inspires the industry to build a super easy to learn language/environment
for UI and data apps again.

VB had an extremely low barrier of entry, it was truly empowering for many non
techies.

~~~
bitwize
They should open-source Q(uick)Basic and with it GORILLAS.BAS, MONEY.BAS,
NIBBLES.BAS, and DONKEY.BAS. State-of-the-art programming power for your XT,
286, or higher PC compatible, free and open source.

~~~
anthk
Check QB64. It runs even that Stephen King novel based text adventure.

------
FigmentEngine
I programmed VB from the first version up to vb.net

to me it had these big draws 1) REALLY good documentation, this was the peak
of MSDN.

2) object orientation for ui component reuse just made so much more sense than
message queues in c/c++

3) out of the box ui that looked like a windows app. easy to make something
that looked like users expectation of a windows app

4) speed of design and iteration. you could build new ui really quickly, and
iterate with the edit/continue feature

5) it was cheap compared to other products, and continued to evolve with new
versions on a regular basis. it had momentum

------
jimmcslim
This seems relevant;

RAD Basic, a new IDE for Visual Basic 6.

[http://radbasic.dev](http://radbasic.dev)

Personally, I’ve always thought there was a niche for a VB6 runtime
implemented on .NET that could intercept method calls an enable a system to be
slowly rewritten in C#; issues with COM interop esp. visual components might
be a challenge.

~~~
Renaud
A great idea that I hope they can make happen. Sounds like quite an
undertaking though.

------
Doubl
The people still developing in vb6 are a pretty relaxed lot these days, no one
worries any more that the apps won't run in windows, they will, forever. It's
still possible to get new activex components for skinning or whatever and if
all else fails there's always interops with .net. Meanwhile the vb6 ide is
lightning quick, designed as it was back in win 95 days, and with a couple of
add ons can be very up to date.

------
JeanMarcS
The first version of the software that made our company launch back in the
90’s was made with Delphi with a browser like component that we discovered,
after making successful demos to French historic telco leading to more visible
demos, was a 30 days demo and that we couldn’t compile anymore without a
message box stating that.

So due to emergency we rewrote all in a week in VB6 (or maybe it was 4 or 5 I
don’t really remember) with the Internet Explorer browser object.

And thanks to the simplicity of Visual Basic it was possible to do so !

And then the demos lead to sales and we are still here 22 years later

~~~
repolfx
That's kind of weird. I recall Delphi could embed IE directly, maybe not in
the version you used?

Why was it easier to rewrite all your code than just buy a license to the
component though?

~~~
JeanMarcS
I think it was Borland Delphi 3 or 4, and there where a browser object,
perhaps based on IE, but demo.

It was in 1997 and it was not possible to order via Internet so the times the
letter with the licence number arrive from US to France and we would have
missed the important demo.

Plus, to be completely honest, we were totally broke !

------
jboles
I got started with graphical programming with RapidQ, a sort-of cross between
VB and Delphi (and the predecessor to RealBasic). I had a 486/Pentium I
machine around that time, with not enough hard disk space to install VB (and
too young to afford upgrades or VB itself).

It was not as powerful as VB, but being able to display graphical widgets in
as few lines of code as VB got me hooked. Funnily enough RapidQ also supported
writing CGI apps, which was my gateway into server-side programming.

------
projektfu
I’m just going to put my two cents into this outpouring of love for VB. Of all
the languages that were available, this one was one of the worst. For some
reason they paired it with a highly useful RAD environment. (Probably because
of billg’s historical love for Basic).

Error handling was dismal. It was painfully obvious very few VB developers
understood it and most applications would crash on failed IO. I’m talking
production applications sold to third parties with 10+ years in the field.
Syntax was incredibly clumsy. String manipulation was painful. It had classes
but no inheritance. Small programs required complicated installers because OLE
was the basis of all libraries. Most components came from for profit ISVs, and
community sharing was actually rare. Many components had confusing license
terms enforced by software that was as buggy as VB code often was.

~~~
cm2187
You are describing the 90s, not VB specifically.

------
raintrees
I still have two products in production that I am supporting, both written in
Office Basic on Access - It's been over 10 years now.

And my search through FOSS has been for a similar environment, preferably
supporting Python 3, now that I reflect upon it. Kind of a hold-over from
working in Borland's ObjectVision back in the day, or FoxPro before that (the
jump to Visual FoxPro caused me to stumble), or Paradox before that (as well
as Ashton-Tate's DB2-3 and variants).

And yes, I am a hack who still manages to comment my code, at least at first.
One of those "bad examples" I imagine c-corp professional programmers cite in
TedX talks. But I do get paid :)

------
holri
I am very thankful for MS to abandon VB Classic and suddenly destroy years of
my work on the merit of an egoistical businesses decision. After that I valued
the freedom of software as no 1 priority, rebooted and never looked back.

~~~
lopmotr
The tool to port to .Net wasn't as bad as the article claims. I ported a
pretty big messy WinForms application which was somebody else's years of work
and today it's even more successful than ever. It took maybe a week or two to
work through the many 100s of errors, but none were that difficult. I had
already learned not to rely on proprietary binary libraries that were popular
back then because you knew they wouldn't be supported in the future when you'd
need them.

I'm very grateful for VB.Net. It's much cleaner and safer than VB6. My biggest
wish now is for a way to port to C# piecemeal instead of doing the whole
project in one shot.

~~~
holri
I never tried to porting tool. Because porting to another proprietary platform
did not make any sense to me after I experienced first hand what non-freedom
means. I learned my lesson the hard way.

------
karmakaze
VB was the greatest thing I'd seen (before I saw SmallTalk or NeXTSTEP). I
preferred the 1.0 'edit on your desktop' over the later nested window UX.

I had recently taken OS/2 Presentation Manager courses at Microsoft and
started to tinker with making an OS/2 version. The toy turned into a
client/server product for the company that produced code generator and
analysis tools for enterprise. It eventually because a cross-platform tool
running on OS/2 or Win NT and targeting OS/2 and Win32/Win16. A separate X11
editor targeted several Unixes using the same document format and generator
templates.

Good times.

~~~
iforgotpassword
> I preferred the 1.0 'edit on your desktop' over the later nested window UX.

Later versions including 6 could be switched back to SDI mode. I never liked
it though, too confusing if you had stuff open in the background.

------
ilaksh
I will go ahead and say that it still is a better tool in various contexts
than what a lot of programmers use now.

I'm saying that as someone who did quite a lot of VB6 programming many, many
years ago but now generally creates UIs with some HTML or Vue or whatever
inside of vim.

I think a lot more of what we do is related to fashion as much as any
technical reason.

It's definitely not cool to program in VB6. People will assume you are not a
programmer or just write awful code.

But that happens with any tool that really significantly makes programming
easier, if it touches on the core paradigm of colorful cryptic text.

------
fopen64
IMHO VB was not respected because you could not write your own
components/widgets in VB, you had to resort to C++. Delphi components were all
written in Delphi. It was clear VB was a second-class citizen.

Due to this factor, and others, VB had the typical Microsoft learning curve:
extremely easy to do simple things, and then exponentially difficult to do big
things. It was the same in MS-Access that many people thought it was the
future of client/server apps, ERP apps, etc.

This limitation was lifted in VB6 or so (dumped VB for Delphi when left win16
for win32 so I am not sure).

~~~
megaremote
You couldn't compile it into an app. So you had to distribute the source code.
This meant it was a dead-end for anything serious.

~~~
jmkni
VB6? You could definitely compile VB6 code into an application and distribute
it without the source code!

------
wolfspider
It's worth mentioning that VB6 became a very potent tool for script kiddies to
wreak havoc all over the place. This was ~14 years ago and there was no good
decompiler back then. VB6 compiled to machine code (.exe) so trying to trace
exploits against software was within the ASM itself. Aside from that it was a
solid workhorse language that was breezy compared to VS2005 and MFC programs.
I still have nightmares to this day that start out with me writing an include
to stdafx.h because something went wrong...

------
AdrianB1
I learned BASIC in the late eighties. When VB appeared it was close, but not
really BASIC. When VB.NET and Visual Basic for Applications (Excel/Access/etc
version of VB) forked in all directions I had to write some VBA, but I ran
away as soon as possible: from one language it forked to too many dialects
that were too incompatible to matter. Divide and conquer transformed in divide
and destroy. Now I use C# whenever VB would be a choice, I am not Microsoft's
puppet to put up with the VB mess.

~~~
ptx
VBA is exactly the same language as VB 6. VBScript, which was used for ASP,
was quite different though.

------
bastawhiz
I learned to "seriously" program in VB. First in 6, then every version up
through 2018. It was easy to get into because the hard parts (gui programming)
were not done with code—or at least, not done with code you ever needed to
look at. The error messages helped young me worry about logic and control flow
instead of memory management. I got to learn how to build software that was
good to _use_, practice algorithms with the insanely good debugger, and build
actual executables that I could share.

This led me to JS and PHP (asp.net drove me away from .NET for web) which
ultimately led to my current career.

Granted, there was a lot to learn after I left VB, but for a self-directed ten
year old, it was the perfect tool. Whenever I see someone trying to teach a
youngster C or C++ instead of VB, JS, or Python (or Ruby) I cringe because
there's so much there that they don't seriously need to learn, especially if
they're just interested in dipping their toes in software.

------
lostmsu
It is alive and kicking: deep learning with TensorFlow on VB.NET:
[https://github.com/losttech/Gradient-
Samples/blob/master/VB/...](https://github.com/losttech/Gradient-
Samples/blob/master/VB/FashionMnistVB/FashionMnist.vb)

------
lostgame
VB6 got me started on programming, in a really tangible way I could really
understand - when I was only about ten years old.

I was lucky enough to be playing Sonic 3 and Knuckles on my Sega Genesis
enough that I eventually asked my youth pastor, whom I knew was in IT, 'how do
I make a game like this?'

He responded 'I dunno' and handed me a copy of Visual Studio 6 on a CD, and I
grabbed a bunch of books from the library, and foolishly (but also correctly)
tried to start with C/C++. The frustration of simply getting graphics to
appear on the screen was enough to drive me away from it. While I understood
the logic, what I really needed was a basic-level 2D graphics API like
Cocos2D, likely.

Visual Basic was a very nice balance between code and it's visual link - I get
the same feeling in a great way with Xcode and Interface Builder today. I owe
it my career. :)

~~~
m_mueller
Wasn't VB pretty much a clone of Xcode's granddaddy, the IDE that came with
NeXT step? Even the idea behind ActiveX was copied from there AFAIK. No wonder
Xcode reminds you of VB then.

~~~
lostgame
That's a really cool note! I actually own a NextCube...I hadn't made that
link, especially when I was younger and actually had just gotten started.

------
jacquesm
VB and Delphi as well as other 'RAD' software from the 90's still has its
fans, and some of these systems power very large installations even today. You
wouldn't know about it because all you see is the outside but behind the
scenes you'd be surprised what is running.

~~~
jasonlhy
I think VB dead just because RAD is dead just like the article states:
Careless newbies, bored company workers, and summer students trampled in,
solving challenges that would have been much more difficult on any other
platform, and spraying spaghetti code everywhere. In other words, because VB
was easy enough to use even if you weren’t a trained coder, it was used by
plenty of people who weren’t trained coders. And VB did nothing to encourage
them to correct their bad habits.

------
cm2187
The article present the fact that VB is accessible to non professional
programers as "a problem". I could not disagree more. The future isn't to
coding being a specialized field, but to everyone having basic coding
knowledges. VB in that respect was extremely powerful, and its integration
with Office a genious idea.

The problem rather is that VB6 is a 1990s language and that not only Microsoft
has never made a more modern scripting language available in Office (and I
mean pre-installed on everyone's machine, with an integrated IDE, etc. I know
there are all sorts of hacks and addins) but if anything they seem to consider
scripting nothing more than a security risk and are doing anything they can to
lock office down and make it hard for people to script it.

------
zubairq
I loved VB a lot and am trying to build a modern day version of it which can
build Webapp and Microservice based apps at yazz.com

(Full disclosure: I work at Red Hat but my views do not necessarily reflect my
employers views)

~~~
BubRoss
Why? Is the language really what you want or is it the tools surrounding it?

~~~
zubairq
I want the all in one development system for quick prototypes that can be made
by non technical people , that’s why

~~~
BubRoss
Right, but why use visual basic as the actual language?

~~~
zubairq
I don't. I use Javascript instead of basic. I just use the concept of
components and events and forms from Visual basic

------
uchman
Am I dating myself if i say i started with GW-BASIC... I remember how it was a
big deal to code a menu by highlighting text based on the arrow keys... and
then based on mouse movement

~~~
tssva
If it makes you feel any younger I started with TRS-80 Level 2 BASIC years
before GW-BASIC existed.

------
bluedino
We have probably 100,000 lines of VB code at work. Manufacturing environment
of course. Some of the worst design patterns you will see. None of it is
“modern” Visual Basic. It’s stuff people learned around 1995/96 and stopped
there.

Objects were never embraced. Libraries are shunned. The project started to
encompass every part of the company. It’s truly a picture of “persistence over
skill”.

The worst part is that a couple years ago, the VB programmers started writing
PHP code that is just as bad.

~~~
bigger_cheese
Also in manufacturing similar story.

Most of the VB I've seen is front end code to MS Access '97 running
underneath. We have been slowly chipping away at it and replacing various
components but I wouldn't be surprised if at least some of it still around in
another 10 years.

All sorts of legacy stuff here Visual Fox Pro - which I think is VB precursor
as well. Lots of old 90's Commercial Unix stuff (RS/6000 era - Old C++ code -
pre STL etc). Older than that we have a heap of Fortran and mainframe era
stuff written in PL/1 language. Code and software here has very long lifespan
and not always easy to replace it.

------
pier25
As a kid I dabbled with BASIC on an MSX, but the first real desktop app I made
was with VB on Windows 98 if memory doesn't fail me. It was a catalog of
Starcraft units.

------
oceanghost
My first "real" job was fixing a VB6 app used in a manufacturing setting that
consisted of one 3,000 line function, and one 2,000 line function.

And this was a critical system. It certified the units we made were configured
correctly-- which were then installed in semiconductor fabs.

Also, VB6 is responsible for my favorite bug ever-- an if statement: no more
than "if count=0 then" that opened a dialog box, somehow. It was reproducible
as well.

------
rkagerer
Anybody think there's an opportunity to bring a VB-like experience to web
programming? Could widespread availability of WebAssembly help in that regard?

------
ocdtrekkie
I'm still using VB .NET for hobby projects today: My home automation system
runs on it. Sometimes I have to convert sample code or examples when I'm
having issues to and from C#, but I can write VB a lot faster than other
languages, because as the first one I learned, it still comes second nature to
me.

------
heelix
I was shocked how fast it actually was. In the VB6 days, it was only slightly
slower than the lovingly crafted ATL C++ code for some of the COM component
development. It was crazy - rough out a VB component in a few hours, then
spend a better bit of the week making it 'real'.

------
robomartin
VB was a money maker, flat out. You could deliver great solutions to problems
while standing on your head. And the fact that it extended into Office S VBA
made it even better.

We wrote plenty of code in VC++, but I have to admit that VB had massively
better ROI.

------
soup10
Started programming with BASIC on a graphing calculator and it was easy to
move on to C and Java from there. The use of english words over symbols and a
lack of boiler plate and "concept clutter" is beginner friendly.

------
uchman
Btw, VB6 still kinda lives on in form of VBA macros on Microsoft Office
products

------
mpalfrey
I started off doing VB6, both at a personal level, then a few years later,
commercially.

It wasn't bad. If you wanted a quick app with a few forms and a backend DB,
then this was a decent choice.

I quite like it.

------
smitty1e
I keep my favorite VBA jokes in github library called NVBC, the
"NecroVisualBasiCon".

With the Regex and Scripting runtim COM objects, tools like a string
interpolator are within reach.

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xpil
I wrote my first program in QBasic. I played Gorillas (like, a lot). If they
decide to kill VB, I'm gonna cry.

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tomc1985
DoEvents

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cm2187
Still in vb.net! Async/await before its time!

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dvdhsu
I’m so glad people are finally talking about VB! For a certain subset of
programming, VB is very effective.

I’ve been working on “VB, but hosted in the cloud, and built specifically for
developers”: [https://tryretool.com](https://tryretool.com). We’re still
early, so I'd appreciate any feedback :). To use Retool, you’re ideally an
engineer who knows both SQL and JS. We connect to most databases, as well as
any arbitrary REST / GraphQL APIs.

(Our docs are at [https://docs.tryretool.com.](https://docs.tryretool.com.))

Edit: removed a part I didn’t fully agree with, but paraphrased.

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maxxxxx
"As the essay notes though, I think VB possibly made programming _too_ easy,
which led to poorly built and poorly maintained apps."

This feels a little elitist to me. VB (and Access) allowed a lot of people to
develop mission critical things rapidly they would never have been able to
afford before.

When I look at the complex monstrosities we develop these days I don't know if
they are in any way more maintainable or well-built. Yes the people who
created them know them in and out but give them a few years to become legacy
and outdated and they will become a maintenance nightmare.

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chunsj
The story is behind the paywall but I think from my experience that the VB had
been an inferior version of smalltalk.

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Bishonen88
uBlock with Firefox gives me no paywalls on medium.

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pmarin
Or block javascript in any browser.

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gautam1168
stopped reading after the third time the author dissed javascript

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eeZah7Ux
A practical and popular corporate-driven language. Just like Go and Rust.

Then the company decides to bend it out of shape or slow down the development.
People cannot do anything about it because it's corporate-driven.

And yet, people have not learnt the lesson.

~~~
badsectoracula
Well, yeah, kinda, sort of... difference being that if Visual Basic was open
source, it'd probably still be around, just not under Microsoft.

