181–190 of 292 posts
Still a learning tool for many. However, it was for microsoft a complete dead end technology that should have been killed in the 90's where it lay.
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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…
>>VB6 was one nice thing - build 'a program' as you understand them in Windows. Why the fuck is it so hard nowadays? VS isn't intuitive - it's a firehouse of information and I feel like you need training to use it. That is a bummer. Great question. And I agree with the sentiment. My opinion for "why is it so hard today": it has to do with the way .NET evolved right after its birth. .NET was a response to Java by Micr…
> ...astounding achievement from Redmond. It boasted interactive tools to create GUI drag and drop features users were accustomed to in VB6 but glaringly missing in the Java world. This was with Visual Studio 97
Thay were not "glaringly missing in the Java world" in 1997 when Visual Studio was released. By that time at least these 2 IDEs with "drag and drop" were released and used already: Symantec Visual Café (a good one!), and a beta of IBM VisualAge (second part of 96). VisualAge came with specific ibm's understanding of drag and drop, however the Visual Café's experience was really similar to VB and much easier than J++ from what I remember. I tried all of them at the time including JBuilder and Sybase. JBuilder was my best for quite time.
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.”
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>>VB6 was one nice thing - build 'a program' as you understand them in Windows. Why the fuck is it so hard nowadays? VS isn't intuitive - it's a firehouse of information and I feel like you need training to use it. That is a bummer. Great question. And I agree with the sentiment. My opinion for "why is it so hard today": it has to do with the way .NET evolved right after its birth. .NET was a response to Java by Micr…
You write: > ...astounding achievement from Redmond. It boasted interactive tools to create GUI drag and drop features users were accustomed to in VB6 but glaringly missing in the Java world. This was with Visual Studio 97 Thay were not "glaringly missing in the Java world" in 1997 when Visual Studio was released. By that time at least these 2 IDEs with "drag and drop" were released and used already: Symantec Visual…
The original version was an attempt at Delphi for Java and I liked it far better than Netbeans later, but I came from Delphi to Java so that makes sense.
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?
https://www.xojo.com/index_xojo.php
Not open source but it looks quite interesting.
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.
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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?
The progression from there is python for those who want to control devices, or web dev for those more drawn to the visual design part. A missing piece is something for making games that sits in the middle of scratch and C++/unity. I don’t know how kids make that transition.
To me, this shows the huge risk of building on a language/platform that depends on a single company. This even happened earlier. Visual Basic .NET is grossly incompatible with Visual Basic 6, so much so that Visual Basic .NET is essentially a different language and was derisively called Visual Fred http://catb.org/~esr/jargon/html/V/Visual-Fred.html ... Of course, it was possible to rewrite software so that would wor…
I never understood why F/OSS didn't kick in to provide a portable runtime for VB or classic BASIC. There is/was something like GWA Basic, wasn't there? At least I'm not aware of a formal language spec for (classic) BASIC from the likes of ISO.