21–30 of 535 posts
VB.NET - at least initial versions - was about productive as C#, thus there was no incentive to use VB.
The thing that made VB6 super productive was it's form designer. The .NET successor - WinForms designer - wasn't nearly as fast and capable (to this day, really).
VB 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.
There are things like WebFlow and FlutterFlow but those tools feel clunky by comparison.
I 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.
Web development meanwhile went bonkers and VB was a poor cousin to C# very suddenly.
Its a shame, VB was not for purists but it was very productive.
Does VBA for Excel count? Because if it does then VBA for Excel has reached the"nuclear resistant cockroach" level in finance. You wouldn't believe what sort of processes in very big banks/financial institutions are built using 10 year old VBA macros. In fact, VBA consulting for finance is a very juicy cottage industry at least in Europe to this very day.
I 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.
Problem is a lot of apps that would have been traditional LOB apps written in VB/C# have moved to the web so demand isn't there's clear advantages to C# as a language over VB.
IMO, it didn't really make a smooth transition to the web. Webforms was the attempt but it was a leaky abstraction (iirc, it kept state for UI components but not variables so things got... weird) and kind of worked against the paradigms at the time (everything was a POST).
- Why is JS popular? Not because it's the best language, but because it's attached to the browser, and people want to deploy apps to browsers (Figma, etc.)
- Why is shell the 8th most popular language on Github, and the 6th fastest growing? [1] Not because it's the best language, but because it's attached to the Unix kernel (specifically Linux, which has a ton of features). Software in containers and virtual machines must talk to kernels.
So then the converse is
- Why is VB no longer popular? Not because it's a worse language than it used to be (though maybe that's true), but the platform that it supported isn't as popular.
Like others said, it's probably popular for Excel and app automation, etc. But today more apps are targeting web and mobile, not Windows desktop.
- Same answer with Objective C and Swift -- people are using them to write apps for a platform. And Kotlin/Android, etc.
[1] https://octoverse.github.com/2022/top-programming-languages
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
You bring up a good point, which is that I remember most the GUI builder. Basic isn't really that great a language, all things considered. But being able to quickly design and deploy GUI apps with VB was better than anything I've encountered since. There are things like WebFlow and FlutterFlow but those tools feel clunky by comparison.
VB was great if you needed to do something limited to a single machine.
These days, we want data to be available across machines which requires using a network, and the default network is the internet.
If I'm going to be using the internet anyway, I can knock up something in HTML + JS + firebase/whatever data store, and have an application that works on any platform, and is accessible from anywhere in the world. You might need slightly more technical knowledge, but not so much that you can't have a simple CRUD app running in a day or so of work.