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Microsoft plots the end of Visual Basic

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Re: Microsoft plots the end of Visual Basic

#81
I never understood the purpose of VB.Net. My second job out of college was a mixture of VB6 and C++ where we would use C++/ATL (COM) to mix and match languages. Of course the VB6 IDE was miles better than the C++ IDE.

But, Windows Forms with C# was just as easy as VB6 and VB.Net was just as complicated and more verbose than C#.

Re: Microsoft plots the end of Visual Basic

#82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They had an opportunity to make a whole new, good, scripting language. And blew it spectacularly.

The decision to make the console output as the return value of a function alone almost destroys it for larger scripting projects. It’s a really bad decision and they could still fix it by adding some environment variable that disables this “feature” while staying compatible with old scripts.

PREACH

But just so you are aware you can use the 'class' modifier To change this behavior.

It is one of the most fundamentally bizarre language design choices I have seen in my career

Re: Microsoft plots the end of Visual Basic

#83
VB was a great and successful language. It empowered a lot of departments to create bespoke programs that, while not having been built on solid comp sci principles, were good enough and solved real business problems without having to involve the IT department. That’s a strength and a weakness.

Re: Microsoft plots the end of Visual Basic

#84
post #6

I loved VB6. Of all the languages and IDE's I've ever used, I've never been more efficient in any other one. As long as MS doesn't break my workarounds to run that old IDE or its EXE's, I'm happy. VB.NET was a great stepping stone, but after switching to C# I never looked back. The only thing I miss is global functions that don't need a class qualifier in front of them. And I still find the Edit-and-Continue debuggin…

My kingdom for the VB6 time traveling debugger in every language.

Re: Microsoft plots the end of Visual Basic

#85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

CMD is the worst language I ever saw. It's full of hacks for simplest tasks. The only reason I'm using it is for old systems where PS is not preinstalled. I used PS to write small scripts and I actually like it. I'm more fluent with bash, but that's only because I used bash a lot. PowerShell feels more robust, no silly space-in-filename problems, no silly parsing of text output to access fields. May be it's ugly for…

"I would love to learn why people think that power shell is ugly, especially comparing with bash. " I don't think people compare it with bash, but with more modern languages.

One criticism I've seen and levied myself is the sheer amount of typing:

[PS] C:\> Get-MyReallyLongFunctionName -Server furtle

$ lol --floop

PS is fine but it takes ages for the bloody thing to wake up and notice command completion. It is like dealing with a teenager in bed.

Actually, I have no problems with PS but with MS's idea of search as deployed to users.

(I run KDE on Arch. Search is faster than I can blink)

Re: Microsoft plots the end of Visual Basic

#86
post #57

I first learned how to program in VB4. I can see why as a professional programmer it lost favor, but it was a great learning language.

> great learning language E.W.Dijkstra would disagree: "It is practically impossible to teach good programming to students that have had a prior exposure to BASIC: as potential programmers they are mentally mutilated beyond hope of regeneration."

You could say the same about (early) php.

Re: Microsoft plots the end of Visual Basic

#87
post #6

I loved VB6. Of all the languages and IDE's I've ever used, I've never been more efficient in any other one. As long as MS doesn't break my workarounds to run that old IDE or its EXE's, I'm happy. VB.NET was a great stepping stone, but after switching to C# I never looked back. The only thing I miss is global functions that don't need a class qualifier in front of them. And I still find the Edit-and-Continue debuggin…

> I loved VB6. Of all the languages and IDE's I've ever used, I've never been more efficient in any other one. Other than the amount of work it would take, what's to keep someone from taking all of the specs and docs, and implementing a language compatible with VB6 and VB.NET?

Nothing, it is just that nobody bothered. There have been a bunch of classic-VB-like languages (even IBM made one with their 'Visual Age for Basic' - though they really missed the mark on the IDE side, but the language and features were very VB6-like), but pretty much all of them either get abandoned or miss the entire point of classic VB by focusing on one thing (usually the language) while ignoring another (usually the IDE or sometimes the fact that classic VB is almost a 'live' system and instead they put a clear C-like separation between editing and compilation)... or miss completely by doing all these things wrong. Assuming they do not die off before managing to make anything usable, of course.

Re: Microsoft plots the end of Visual Basic

#88
post #57

I first learned how to program in VB4. I can see why as a professional programmer it lost favor, but it was a great learning language.

> great learning language E.W.Dijkstra would disagree: "It is practically impossible to teach good programming to students that have had a prior exposure to BASIC: as potential programmers they are mentally mutilated beyond hope of regeneration."

> E.W.Dijkstra would disagree

Yes. And Dijkstra would be wrong. (Or, perhaps more accurately, prone to somewhat bombastic hyperbole.)

BASIC is structurally similar to ASM, moreso than is any other HLL, at least of any popularity. Like almost any language (or paradigm) it is possible to get stuck in its particular ruts, and when BASIC was at its peak popularity there were probably lots of people stuck in those ruts just as later happened with Java and the static, class-based OO paradigm more generally. A learning language isn't something you stock with exclusively, it's something you learn with and then diversify from, ideally, and for that, BASIC (old-school unstructured imperative BASIC) is great.

Re: Microsoft plots the end of Visual Basic

#89
post #6

I loved VB6. Of all the languages and IDE's I've ever used, I've never been more efficient in any other one. As long as MS doesn't break my workarounds to run that old IDE or its EXE's, I'm happy. VB.NET was a great stepping stone, but after switching to C# I never looked back. The only thing I miss is global functions that don't need a class qualifier in front of them. And I still find the Edit-and-Continue debuggin…

I used to think this too, but everything you can do in VB6 you can do in powershell, and do it better. Try/Catch, windows forms.. literally anything you can think of. You can even mix powershell and C# together in the same script. Once I realized I had a better version of everything I wanted, it became my new favorite.

When it comes to classic VB (aka VB6) it isn't so much what you can do but how you do it. After all everything that was possible with VB6 was also possible with Visual C++.

Re: Microsoft plots the end of Visual Basic

#90

That is so sad. "There’s something deeply right about how list indexing and function application are the same operation". That is a quote from a recent submission about K ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22504106 ), and that is a perfect example of how I usually get VB nostalgia attacks: somebody talks about a thing in other language they consider amazing implying that that thing is unique for that language des…

I'm pretty sure that there are a few languages where array indexing is basically calling a function that returns a reference to the cell you're accessing.
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