171–180 of 292 posts
This is gonna be like Python 3. There is an innumerable amount of “production” VB.
Is there really a lot of production VB.NET? I wouldn't be at all surprised to learn there is more production VB 6 code and development on that stopped two decades ago.
I first learned how to program in VB4. I can see why as a professional programmer it lost favor, but it was a great learning language.
> great learning language E.W.Dijkstra would disagree: "It is practically impossible to teach good programming to students that have had a prior exposure to BASIC: as potential programmers they are mentally mutilated beyond hope of regeneration."
I loved VB6. Of all the languages and IDE's I've ever used, I've never been more efficient in any other one. As long as MS doesn't break my workarounds to run that old IDE or its EXE's, I'm happy. VB.NET was a great stepping stone, but after switching to C# I never looked back. The only thing I miss is global functions that don't need a class qualifier in front of them. And I still find the Edit-and-Continue debuggin…
`using static` goes some way toward simulating free functions in C#.
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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.
Quickly and easily design and make a GUI program with n real training? VB6 got me into programming as a kid. I mostly use python for stats stuff. I sorta understand how to run up a GUI using tkinter, but it seems like a huge pain in the ass. I'm sure Visual Studio offers the ability to do whatever VB6 could with a GUI, but it isn't obvious how to get there. VB6 was one nice thing - build 'a program' as you understand…
My opinion for "why is it so hard today": it has to do with the way .NET evolved right after its birth. .NET was a response to Java by Microsoft. What Microsoft did in effect was attempt to smother the Java juggernaut by introducing their own Java with J++ (Anders' team) but only available on Windows (their attempt to prevent the allure of Java's platform independence).
By all accounts that attempt was an astounding achievement from Redmond. It boasted interactive tools to create GUI drag and drop features users were accustomed to in VB6 but glaringly missing in the Java world. This was with Visual Studio 97. Then the lawsuits with Sun came. The aftermath of the J++/Microsoft Java debacle was the beginning of .NET. A "Java" for Windows with attendant crazies of the Java world. This is the reason why it is hard. Java was "hard" compared to VB6, therefore .NET had to be hard in the same way.
All analogous complexities associated with the Java world: build tools, runtime versioning tools and intermediate code compilers etc were forever required, keeping this huge katamari ball of technical debt alive for over 20 years.
Now we have .NET Core. So we've just reset the clocks and in one swoop gone right back to 1998 with a new Microsoft Java but this time it is cross platform!
22 years of a meandering path that ends up right where we started!
I am, quite frankly, exhausted.
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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.
Quickly and easily design and make a GUI program with n real training? VB6 got me into programming as a kid. I mostly use python for stats stuff. I sorta understand how to run up a GUI using tkinter, but it seems like a huge pain in the ass. I'm sure Visual Studio offers the ability to do whatever VB6 could with a GUI, but it isn't obvious how to get there. VB6 was one nice thing - build 'a program' as you understand…
edit - I'm guessing whoever downvoted doesn't know who Trent Lott is.
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> You can even mix powershell and C# together in the same script. What feature are you referring to?
You can load a .NET dll in a Powershell script and invoke it. https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/powershell/module/microsoft...
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A whole lot of us got into programming as kids because of VB. What do young people have today like it?
HTML/JavaScript. That has the shortest start-making-a-GUI story (plain JavaScript; React/Webpack/etc. absolutely do not have this level of accessibility).
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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.
Quickly and easily design and make a GUI program with n real training? VB6 got me into programming as a kid. I mostly use python for stats stuff. I sorta understand how to run up a GUI using tkinter, but it seems like a huge pain in the ass. I'm sure Visual Studio offers the ability to do whatever VB6 could with a GUI, but it isn't obvious how to get there. VB6 was one nice thing - build 'a program' as you understand…
My takes is because it's not modular enough. Sure it's easy to plop this and that components here and there, add events, etc. However as requirement changing each pages / sections need to be changed as well. Not to mention portability to linux or mac. That and we're talking about db access, drivers, and security (in memory data sniffing / tepering).
Of course it doesn't applied to all kind of apps, but those who need constant changing are the one who pays Microsoft bills.
Given a silverlight impl just got hn three days ago... We live in incredible times