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Ask HN: Why did Visual Basic die?

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Re: Ask HN: Why did Visual Basic die?

#91

Post by bazoom42 »

The web happened. VB was great for builing stand alone desktop applications, possibly with database integration. But they never managed to deliver a similar slick and self-contained solution for building web-based solutions. It didn’t help that the migration from vb6 to vb.net was too painful, but the root cause was the demand for business desktop apps disappeared.

The infamous WebForms API was supposed to bring the same gui builder paradigm to the web, but the developer experience was not as great.

Re: Ask HN: Why did Visual Basic die?

#93

Post by dotnet00 »

smackeyacky wrote: post #24

Microsoft 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.

Agreed, .NET (well, C# specifically) was my go to for anything with a GUI until they tried moving on from Winforms/WPF and the way forward seemed to become a large undefined mess.

Re: Ask HN: Why did Visual Basic die?

#94

Post by asveikau »

With VB.NET, VB basically turned into C# with different syntax. I think a lot of people in that space might as well have been writing C#, so a lot of them switched. Then separately, perhaps almost simultaneously, the Microsoft ecosystem lost relevance.

Re: Ask HN: Why did Visual Basic die?

#95

Post by runjake »

You're probably speaking to VB plus Visual Studio RAD (Rapid Application Development aka "drag and drop" GUI programming) and you more or less still have that today with VB.NET and Windows Forms, with minor differences.

What killed the older VB6 and it's APIs, whose name I can't recall even though I developed for it in the 1990s, was .net coming along.

Be warned, it might just be easier to learn C# as it's more well-supported/documented, and VB.net seems like effectively a language dialect of C#.

Re: Ask HN: Why did Visual Basic die?

#98

Post by bsimpson »

_f1dq wrote: post #42
dghlsakjg wrote: post #30

I think for a lot of purposes, the internet kind of took over. 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 a…

I can write HTML/CSS/JS and a few back-end languages like PHP in my sleep but there's no way I could hand-code a web app as fast as I could a desktop app in 1997 using VB. I would LOVE it if I could, though.

I've never written VB, but I can bang out a React UI in jsxstyle like nobody's business.

You've piqued my curiosity.

Re: Ask HN: Why did Visual Basic die?

#99

Post by themerone »

bmitc wrote: post #76

I think the answer is: because Microsoft let it. I'm a big fan of modern .NET, but my biggest complaint is that Microsoft views, and always has, the CLR as the C# Language Runtime and not the Common Language Runtime. For example, see the relationship between F# and C#. The CLR is constantly getting features that are only to support features in C#, leaving F# in a position where they either don't get the feature, can'…

The F# situation is not comparable to VB.NET.

VB.NET was just C# semantics with a VB like syntax. From the beginning it didn't serve any purpose except to make VB Fans feel slightly more at home.

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