Ask HN: Why did Visual Basic die?

I've been a software developer for almost 30 years. I remember using VB back in the 90's and I was thinking about it the other day and it dawned on me; despite all the advances in technology since then, nothing I have found compares to that development experience today. I would go so far as to say we've gone backwards in a big way.

Now, I'm no fan of Microsoft products but, I have yet to find a tool that can allow me to be as productive in so short a time as Visual Basic. Yet I can't help wondering what problems it had that caused them to abandon it? Moreover, why hasn't someone come out with a solid replacement?

I honestly haven't used it because I thought they had retired it altogether. The last time I did use it was about 20 years ago and found that they had changed it enough that I wasn't nearly as productive with it as, say, VB6.

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).

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.

Are 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 integrated.

I don't think this is really VB or NET's fault, Microsoft just kinda missed (or failed the fight against) the web transition. They were busy trying to make it coexist with Windows with seamless downloads like ClickOnce but ultimately simple web pages won out for their reach and ease of use, then mobile app stores came along, and now desktop apps are petty much dead except for niches.