I loved VB. I don't think I've ever been as productive as I was in VB - I could literally knock together a complete desktop application in an afternoon. It wasn't perfect. There were lots of problems with it. It would never win prizes in CS competitions. But man you could build shit with it fast.
Delphi is still around and just as fast to knock something together in. I switched from VB4 to delphi when that was released and never used VB again.
And if you can't afford Delphi, Lazarus is okay, not as well documented, but works well, and the price is right. ($0.00)
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.
This isn't true. I tried to submit something yesterday but got auto-redirected to a previous submission of the same url, from seven months ago.
In 96 there was also Xelfi which later became Netbeans. The original version was an attempt at Delphi for Java and I liked it far better than Netbeans later, but I came from Delphi to Java so that makes sense.
>>but I came from Delphi to Java so that makes sense. Same. But I have remained with Delphi. I think we are now known as the lost generation. :-)
Doing .NET and Java nowadays, started using Borland products with Turbo Basic, jumped into Turbo Pascal 3.0, all the way up to Delphi 1.0 and C++ Builder, before caving in to the MFC world back then.
As an ex-VB6 programmer, my view is that Microsoft has been fairly supportive of VB users. - The IDE itself was supported for 10 years, till 2008 - The runtime is supported till 2024, which is like 26 years. I think you can get it to work on Windows 10 as well, though I haven't tried it myself. I still see people using VB apps. My view is that VB.Net should never have been created, since it was closer to C# than it w…
On the other side the reason VB.net broke backward compatibility was to correct things that were obviously bad design decisions in VB6. Like parameters being byref by default, having to use the Set keyword for objects, inconsistent 0 or 1 based collection structures, etc. If VB was meant to survive and move the XXI century, these things had to be fixed.
VB.NET half-broke the compatibility, which got it stuck in the weird space where automatic translation from VB6 was no longer possible, but VB still had lots of quirks that made it harder to coevolve it with C#.
> "Classic" Visual Basic has been ended for a long time now. It kinda still lives on in classic ASP. It will be supported indefinitely so far [1] [1] https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/help/2669020/active-serv...
IIS ASP and the Shell CScript/WScript hosts are just environments for the COM-based Active Scripting engine. At the time it was very capable as lots of software titles opened themselves up to automation via COM - that's why you could have Classic ASP pages that invoked Office Excel to generate charts dynamically. Unfortunately it was all a mess, but it was also something beautiful because it meant that a desktop/serv…
The new ways of automating applications is Powrshel with its COM/.NET/DLL integration.
And UWP as modern COM is here to stay, no matter what, Microsoft seems to be willing to spend the money to keep it going, even it requires a new programmer generation.
To me, this shows the huge risk of building on a language/platform that depends on a single company. This even happened earlier. Visual Basic .NET is grossly incompatible with Visual Basic 6, so much so that Visual Basic .NET is essentially a different language and was derisively called Visual Fred http://catb.org/~esr/jargon/html/V/Visual-Fred.html ... Of course, it was possible to rewrite software so that would wor…
Totally agree. I'm always confused why people eg buy in to TypeScript, when for me the entire point of using JavaScript is its portability and ubiquity. If you're willing to accept a build/compilation step, then there are much, much better languages out there IMO, rather than slowly shoehorning weakly-typed languages to become "more like Java", and creating guaranteed portability and lock-in issues along the way. I n…
There are several VB-like FOSS clones, Gambas being the most well known.
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…
Yeah VB got me into programming as well, there was a book literally called "programming for kids", it came with a copy of Visual Studio 6 and it was a few simple things like making a calculator, making a simple pong clone etc....that was the best thing as a 10 year old. Now I'm a professional C++ programmer, so....yeah, thanks VB! We'll miss you.
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.
Yes, it is the to go programming language in life sciences corporations when Office users outgrow their VBA skills and get to have IT install VS on their computers.
I know a couple of places like this, no R, no Python, VB all the way.
Python seems to be the new "beginners" programming language (the "B" in Basic), it's taught in schools now and makes Basic look rather archaic in comparison. So I would say the writing is on the wall. What was good about Visual Basic was the IDE and GUI builder. Sadly this has no real modern competitor in terms of ease of use.