221–230 of 535 posts
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.
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++.
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 ca…
VB6 you would have connected to the db by the end of the day. C/C++ you're still trying to handle WM_ERASEBKGND
Python is the new VB
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-…
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.
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.
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 o…
The closest thing I've found in the modern age is https://anvil.works - basically works like Delphi/VB, but web based, and in Python. For both frontend and backend.
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 ca…