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Microsoft plots the end of Visual Basic

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Re: Microsoft plots the end of Visual Basic

#121

Post by kjaftaedi »

badsectoracula wrote: post #89
kjaftaedi wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I used to think this too, but everything you can do in VB6 you can do in powershell, and do it better. Try/Catch, windows forms.. literally anything you can think of. You can even mix powershell and C# together in the same script. Once I realized I had a better version of everything I wanted, it became my new favorite.

When it comes to classic VB (aka VB6) it isn't so much what you can do but how you do it. After all everything that was possible with VB6 was also possible with Visual C++.

Working in a windows environment you often end up dealing with powershell already .. which means you don't have to learn another language and ends up simplifying everything.

This is the VB6 comparison in my book.

Re: Microsoft plots the end of Visual Basic

#122

Post by kuzimoto »

Ididntdothis wrote: post #96
gerdesj wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One criticism I've seen and levied myself is the sheer amount of typing: [PS] C:\> Get-MyReallyLongFunctionName -Server furtle $ lol --floop PS is fine but it takes ages for the bloody thing to wake up and notice command completion. It is like dealing with a teenager in bed. Actually, I have no problems with PS but with MS's idea of search as deployed to users. (I run KDE on Arch. Search is faster than I can blink)

Verb-first was also a bad choice. When I type “get” I am getting thousands of suggestions which makes autocompletion pretty useless. There is also no way to find all cmdlets that deal with active directory. It would be much better if I could type “AD” first and then get all cmdlets that deal with active directory.

I don't think it's that bad. Better than bash where every command has is either something archaic or just what whoever wrote it wanted it to be. It better resembles English than the other way around. Plus you can use "get-command "something`" which gives you everything that contains that string, or search for a certain provider for all commands related to a specific thing.

Autocompletion still works, just type first letter or two after get and filter most stuff out.

Re: Microsoft plots the end of Visual Basic

#123

Post by dfrunza »

It's the year 2039. Microsoft anounced that "Going forward, we do not plan to evolve .NET Core as a platform ... The future ... is to provide a good path forward for the existing .NET customers who want to migrate their applications to the .CRAP NuFart framework."

Re: Microsoft plots the end of Visual Basic

#124

Post by hermitdev »

ripley12 wrote: post #43

My first real job was on a .NET stack that was 1/2 VB.NET and 1/2 C# for legacy reasons. It was weird at first, but I mostly stopped noticing after a few months - the two were completely interoperable and they both compile down to the same .NET IL. In practice, coding in VB.NET was 99% the same as coding in C#, just with a slightly more verbose syntax. Not my favourite language, but much better than its dismal reputa…

Not completely interoperable. At least initially (and as far as I'm aware ever). VB.Net never could understand the unsigned integral & char types. If you used unsigned types in C#, those members wouldn't be BCL compatible and at sufficient warning level, you had to annotate members with [BCLCompliant(false)] if my memory serves correctly.

There were other language constructs at the time that werent 1:1 parity at v1.0, but in nearly 20 years time, I forget.

Re: Microsoft plots the end of Visual Basic

#125

Post by wolfgang42 »

csense wrote: post #77

Previous submission at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22559045 I thought HN was supposed to collapse duplicate submissions to a single topic? URL appears to be identical. Is there some kind of cache issue in HN's backend?

Caching issue is unlikely, given that HN runs as a single thread on a one server, writing to a flat-file backend. As far as I'm aware the main cache involved is the OS's page cache.

To your main point, the dupe detector seems to be fairly limited; I think it only checks for the same URL in the past 12 hours or 100 posts or something. It seems to be just to keep the same post from showing up multiple times in /new.

Re: Microsoft plots the end of Visual Basic

#126

Post by Quarrelsome »

Many fond memories here, can't say I share them. Throughout my career, vb code or programmers/architects from a vb background have been the bane of my existence.

The kind of language that supports the construct:

> on error resume next

(i.e. if any errors happen, just run the next line regardless), needs to die. I appreciate this is harsh but IMO, good riddence.

Re: Microsoft plots the end of Visual Basic

#127

Post by bluedino »

banana_giraffe wrote: post #93
stcredzero wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I loved VB6. Of all the languages and IDE's I've ever used, I've never been more efficient in any other one. Other than the amount of work it would take, what's to keep someone from taking all of the specs and docs, and implementing a language compatible with VB6 and VB.NET?

VB6 and VB.NET are barely related. But, ignoring that, almost any app of any complexity in VB6 land will rely on bugs, quirks, and implementation details. (Also, I was never clear if the binary format for editing forms was actually documented somewhere). Someone could implement their own VB6 parser, but it seems like a ton of work for a vanishing market. All of that said, while typing this, a quick search revealed ht…

>> but it seems like a ton of work for a vanishing market.

That market isn't going anywhere anytime soon, though.

There are a lot of XP machines out there running critical VB code...

Re: Microsoft plots the end of Visual Basic

#128

Post by bluedino »

pfarrell wrote: post #83

VB was a great and successful language. It empowered a lot of departments to create bespoke programs that, while not having been built on solid comp sci principles, were good enough and solved real business problems without having to involve the IT department. That’s a strength and a weakness.

VB is one of those things that let the determined create useful things. Not unlike Microsoft Access.

Instead of actually learning principles and practices, and a 'good' language, they could just hack something together than managed to just barely work, armed with a $99 copy of Visual Basic and a 'Teach Yourself VB in 21 Days' books from SAMS publishing.

And by the time they knew any better, they were up to their ears in shit. Chances are, if you have a big project in VB, you also have the following problems:

* You're not using version control. Or worse, you're running Sourcesafe.

* You're not using secure encryption or communication

* You're not using secure programming practices

* You're not using a modern, secure OS

* You're also using some 16 or 32-bit utility libraries that nobody has the code to

* You're employing developers who have 20 years of "1 year experience with VB"

Re: Microsoft plots the end of Visual Basic

#129

Post by hermitdev »

zozbot234 wrote: post #114
badsectoracula wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When Dijkstra wrote that quote in 1975 he didn't had Visual Basic in mind, he was thinking the much older BASIC dialects that used line numbers and GOTOs for flow control. Dijkstra was trying to promote structured programming languages like Algol and Visual Basic is based on the QBasic dialect which has full structured programming features like WHILE and FOR loops, IF that would work with compound statements (that is…

GOTO for flow control is not that bad, it's just a tail call after all. The real damage is things like having everything be global variables. But part of that was a technical limitation, as things like "proper" call stacks and reentrant code as the default still had plenty of overhead, and even FORTRAN didn't support them.

Goto has its place. It's not evil, but should be used judiciously. After all, C family constructs such as break, continue are glorified/specialized, albeit scoped and unlabelled gotos.

One of the places I like gotos is when I need to break out of a nested loop. A goto to outside of the outer loop is far more obvious than a flag and a conditional to break from the parent nested loop. It also generates better machine code and uses fewer registers, at least in debug mode.

Sure, goto can be abused, just like every other language construct. They have their time and place, though.

Re: Microsoft plots the end of Visual Basic

#130

Post by frequentnapper »

applecrazy wrote: post #53
frequentnapper wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I first learned it by myself in VB5. I didn't even understand functions, but writing those MessageBoxes with buttons and then having them create even more message boxes was so great! I remember a high school friend bringing me 5 diskettes with VB4 installer because I didn't have it on my home computer. Then next year I enrolled in AP Comp Sci - hardcore turbo c++. Just blew my mind!

> Then next year I enrolled in AP Comp Sci - hardcore turbo c++. Funny enough, AP Comp Sci went the other direction in the early 2000s, switching from C++ to Java precisely because it was too hardcore for the average high school student.

haha. I was so excited to learn about C-style strings in AP comp sci 2 I think. And bitshifting, and crazy recursions, queueing, etc. Good old days... I was so arrogant after that too. C is the best and everything else is garbage because it's "slow".
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