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Microsoft plots the end of Visual Basic

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Re: Microsoft plots the end of Visual Basic

#151

Post by pedrocx486 »

ryanmarsh wrote: post #148
trent_lott wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Quickly and easily design and make a GUI program with n real training? VB6 got me into programming as a kid. I mostly use python for stats stuff. I sorta understand how to run up a GUI using tkinter, but it seems like a huge pain in the ass. I'm sure Visual Studio offers the ability to do whatever VB6 could with a GUI, but it isn't obvious how to get there. VB6 was one nice thing - build 'a program' as you understand…

A whole lot of us got into programming as kids because of VB. What do young people have today like it?

From my friend's kids, apparently python is the most common to start coding.

Re: Microsoft plots the end of Visual Basic

#152

Post by spikej »

ryanmarsh wrote: post #148
trent_lott wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Quickly and easily design and make a GUI program with n real training? VB6 got me into programming as a kid. I mostly use python for stats stuff. I sorta understand how to run up a GUI using tkinter, but it seems like a huge pain in the ass. I'm sure Visual Studio offers the ability to do whatever VB6 could with a GUI, but it isn't obvious how to get there. VB6 was one nice thing - build 'a program' as you understand…

A whole lot of us got into programming as kids because of VB. What do young people have today like it?

Winforms with C#?

Re: Microsoft plots the end of Visual Basic

#153

Post by hu3 »

dole wrote: post #141
marcus_holmes wrote: post #60

I loved VB. I don't think I've ever been as productive as I was in VB - I could literally knock together a complete desktop application in an afternoon. It wasn't perfect. There were lots of problems with it. It would never win prizes in CS competitions. But man you could build shit with it fast.

“VB6 makes 95% of programming simple and the other 5% impossible.”

More like "95% simple and 5% possible".

VB6 can call win APIs and C++ code for when some arcane functionality is needed.

Re: Microsoft plots the end of Visual Basic

#154

Post by hu3 »

roenxi wrote: post #144
jeswin wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As an ex-VB6 programmer, my view is that Microsoft has been fairly supportive of VB users. - The IDE itself was supported for 10 years, till 2008 - The runtime is supported till 2024, which is like 26 years. I think you can get it to work on Windows 10 as well, though I haven't tried it myself. I still see people using VB apps. My view is that VB.Net should never have been created, since it was closer to C# than it w…

The typical working career is 40 years. If 10-26 years is considered an acceptable lifetime for a language all your experience in the languages you use will be forcibly reset fairly early in your career. It isn't going to be major in itself, but becoming known for being a specialist in a corporate sponsored language is a pretty catastrophic career error. Anyone who learned C on the other hand looks pretty clever.

I wouldn't use C as comparison. C's ubiquity and durability is not the norm for programming languages.

It's an exception.

Re: Microsoft plots the end of Visual Basic

#155

Post by wazanator »

_vdpp wrote: post #138

VB the _language_ obviously has its limitations and frustrations, but VB the _tool_ will be missed. It seems like every alternative mentioned here adds a lot of additional friction for writing simple, one-off utilities. I don't always want to dink around with the Visual Studio installer to make sure the right version of the MSVC or .NET libraries are installed, or fiddle with code to get a GUI layout to look nice, et…

That's kinda what a C# .NET winforms project is. The WYSIWYG editor is pretty easy and the basics are pretty well documented for all the premade widgets that I feel like anyone who just needs to make a one off util program won't have much trouble.

Re: Microsoft plots the end of Visual Basic

#156

Post by stOneskull »

badsectoracula wrote: post #117
zozbot234 wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

GOTO for flow control is not that bad, it's just a tail call after all. The real damage is things like having everything be global variables. But part of that was a technical limitation, as things like "proper" call stacks and reentrant code as the default still had plenty of overhead, and even FORTRAN didn't support them.

I'm not sure what you have in mind but in the 1975 dialects of BASIC the code was something like 10 REM Grab input 20 GOSUB 1000 30 IF VALUE=BAR THEN GOTO 100 40 IF VALUE=BAZ THEN GOTO 200 50 IF VALUE=BLA THEN GOTO 300 60 GOTO 20 100 REM Bar stuff 110 blahblah 199 RESUME 200 REM Baz stuff 210 blahblah 299 RESUME 300 REM Bla stuff 310 blahblah 399 RESUME 1000 REM Code that grabs input 1010 blahblah 1100 RESUME Or just…

did they use resume before return.. i had no idea. i loved how going from c64 basic to amiga basic, you didn't need line numbers anymore

Re: Microsoft plots the end of Visual Basic

#157

Post by digitalnative97 »

ryanmarsh wrote: post #148
trent_lott wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Quickly and easily design and make a GUI program with n real training? VB6 got me into programming as a kid. I mostly use python for stats stuff. I sorta understand how to run up a GUI using tkinter, but it seems like a huge pain in the ass. I'm sure Visual Studio offers the ability to do whatever VB6 could with a GUI, but it isn't obvious how to get there. VB6 was one nice thing - build 'a program' as you understand…

A whole lot of us got into programming as kids because of VB. What do young people have today like it?

Moding games

Re: Microsoft plots the end of Visual Basic

#158

Post by hu3 »

vibrolax wrote: post #20

I had 7 years of C# experience in 2015 when I had to make an unanticipated job change. With some trepidation, I took a position with another company in the same industry whose codebase was all vb.net. I used Telerik's code converter a lot to bootstrap my proficiency with vb syntax. The boss said I could just write in C# if I wanted to, but I saw no need to make more mental work for the rest of the team.

> The boss said I could just write in C# if I wanted to, but I saw no need to make more mental work for the rest of the team.

You're a real team player. That's both rare and invaluable on current days of resume-driven-development.

Re: Microsoft plots the end of Visual Basic

#160

Post by _bxg1 »

ryanmarsh wrote: post #148
trent_lott wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Quickly and easily design and make a GUI program with n real training? VB6 got me into programming as a kid. I mostly use python for stats stuff. I sorta understand how to run up a GUI using tkinter, but it seems like a huge pain in the ass. I'm sure Visual Studio offers the ability to do whatever VB6 could with a GUI, but it isn't obvious how to get there. VB6 was one nice thing - build 'a program' as you understand…

A whole lot of us got into programming as kids because of VB. What do young people have today like it?

HTML/JavaScript. That has the shortest start-making-a-GUI story (plain JavaScript; React/Webpack/etc. absolutely do not have this level of accessibility).
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