Take a look at this article and chonkthread from a few months ago
Ask HN: Why did Visual Basic die?
51–60 of 535 posts
Re: Ask HN: Why did Visual Basic die?
#52VB 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.
After they re-implemented the compiler in VB.NET and ported it to .NET 5, the language won't get any new features / has stopped development [0]. They basically deprecated it.
[0]: https://mspoweruser.com/microsoft-starts-deprecating-visual-...
Re: Ask HN: Why did Visual Basic die?
#53VB 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.
Is VB.net the same as VB ? Or it is like C# compared to C ?
Well Basic evolved a lot. Comparing 80s Basic on whatever hardware you imagine (think goto + Line Numbers) to 90s Microsoft VisualBasic (think event Händlers for UIs) is a similar jump than VisualBasic to VisualBasic.NET (writing OO code).
VB.NET is the same but so much more evolved. Also the runtime below was switched (surely for the better).
However, like outlined in other comments: VB.NET is a OOP language which handles procedural/functional code as a subset while VB of the 90s was purely procedural.
Re: Ask HN: Why did Visual Basic die?
#54Microsoft accidentally killed it moving to .NET and the increasingly stupid GUI libraries they offered up. Silverlight, 32 bit native, winforms etc and etc. 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.
Do not say WinForms is stupid. The rest I am more than okay with.
Re: Ask HN: Why did Visual Basic die?
#55VB 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.
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Re: Ask HN: Why did Visual Basic die?
#56I used VB all the way from 1.0 to 6.0. And when VB.NET came out came out in 2002, that was exactly when all the types of GUI-database projects VB6 was used for professionally, started being built in PHP/MySQL/HTML/CSS instead. The switch would have happened anyways, but the fact that VB.NET wasn't backwards-compatible made it really easy to switch since you were going to have to learn/build something new anyway -- ot…
Good explanation. Hobbiest switched. Because IIS and Asp.net run very well with VB.NET. but who could afford that compared to PHP.
Re: Ask HN: Why did Visual Basic die?
#57I feel as if I remember using a VB compiler back in the late 80s. Am a hallucinating?
Re: Ask HN: Why did Visual Basic die?
#58Are you talking about VB the language, or Visual Studio the IDE with its awesome GUI builder for WinForms (and not so awesome ones for the subsequent Windows GUI layers, forget what they're called). VB is still around but desktop apps in general (and thus VS's GUI builder) largely gave way to web technologies invented outside Microsoft. The dev experience is definitely worse though. Visual Studio was sooooo nice and…
> web pages won out for their reach and ease of use, Your definition of "ease of use" is amazing. /s
Heh, point taken. But I'd say overall it's easier for grandma to go to Gmail to check her email than have to figure out what this "Netscrape Communicator" is, install it, set up her "pop three" from her "eyesp" and then deal with a million viruses.
Yeah, the web ain't perfect, but it did win... ads got worse, though =/
Re: Ask HN: Why did Visual Basic die?
#59as a VB replacement https://www.lazarus-ide.org/ seems quite solid
Re: Ask HN: Why did Visual Basic die?
#60Does 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.
Healthcare and insurance too! I transform into some glorious magical elf when I volunteer to do the VBA tasks nobody else understands or can lower themselves to do.
You can make Excel do some real wacky stuff. I have a spreadsheet that actually calls out to exec() to run a curl POST on commandline and consume REST API endpoints, parse the results, and update the spreadsheet -- why on earth?? because the API was ready but the web app was delayed. I was the fix. :D