VB6 morphed into VB.Net but then the web took over and anything that could be accomplished as a desktop app was replaced by a web page.
Ask HN: Why did Visual Basic die?
11–20 of 535 posts
Re: Ask HN: Why did Visual Basic die?
#12VB didn't die. It got reborn as VB.NET. Still supported, still used. https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/visual-basic/gettin... The classic VB you probably remember got end-of-lifed in 2008, but MS still supports classic VB apps.
I think that’s the sense in which it died in that if you were going to switch to .NET you would probably also switch to C#. The original VB had A GUI builder better than almost anything (even today!) but the UI builders in today’s visual studio support C# as well if not better than VB.
I once had a job offer from a big company that developed exclusively in VB.NET, after transitioning away from VB6. Both for desktop and web. So it's still out there.
Re: Ask HN: Why did Visual Basic die?
#13It’s simple: Corporate internal app development (mostly CRUD stuff, as you’d expect) was the bread-and-butter of VB, and it moved wholesale to HTML & JavaScript.
Re: Ask HN: Why did Visual Basic die?
#14>> I have yet to find a tool that can allow me to be as productive in so short a time as Visual Basic.
For me: Delphi or Lazarus
Re: Ask HN: Why did Visual Basic die?
#15VB died because of .NET and VB.NET. The syntaxes were similar, but VB.NET was much closer to a "real programming language" in feeling and complexity than VB was, and that's not what anyone who used VB actually wanted.
Microsoft was more interested in developing .NET and C# to battle Java, and less interested in developing and promoting VB, their own successful and original product.
Re: Ask HN: Why did Visual Basic die?
#16I wonder the same thing about Apple's HyperCard. I used HyperCard a ton at school and side-projects. Visual Basic was a firmer and better step-up from that imho, less so as VBScript when it came to browsers.
As per other comments VBA is alive and well and I did many consulting gigs using that in Ireland in the late 1990s. I hope, in the name of all that is holy, that code isn't running still.
Re: Ask HN: Why did Visual Basic die?
#17VB didn't die. It got reborn as VB.NET. Still supported, still used. https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/visual-basic/gettin... The classic VB you probably remember got end-of-lifed in 2008, but MS still supports classic VB apps.
I think that’s the sense in which it died in that if you were going to switch to .NET you would probably also switch to C#. The original VB had A GUI builder better than almost anything (even today!) but the UI builders in today’s visual studio support C# as well if not better than VB.
And everything in that IDE was fast and super responsive. Today's IDE are more complex than ever and yet they lack in functionality that was present in VB6.0
Re: Ask HN: Why did Visual Basic die?
#18My personal reason, which is probably unique:
VB 1.0 was extremely buggy, making it unusable for my use cases.
VB 1.1, which fixed the bugs I was encountering, was a paid upgrade.
I switched to Linux and never looked back.
Re: Ask HN: Why did Visual Basic die?
#19I wonder the same thing about Apple's HyperCard. I used HyperCard a ton at school and side-projects. Visual Basic was a firmer and better step-up from that imho, less so as VBScript when it came to browsers. As per other comments VBA is alive and well and I did many consulting gigs using that in Ireland in the late 1990s. I hope, in the name of all that is holy, that code isn't running still.
I wonder about HyperCard as well. I never used it but, from everything I've ever heard about it, it was also an amazing developer experience.
Re: Ask HN: Why did Visual Basic die?
#20If Microsoft had put more effort into Internet Explorer and VBScript (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VBScript), today's web could look very different, and in some ways better.