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Study: Visual Basic use on the decline
santos_douglas writes "ZDNet news has this story on a study by market researcher Evans Data showing that 'professional' use of Microsoft's Visual Basic language is down significantly. The study pegs VB use at 52%, but of those surveyed 43% intend to switch soon. Of those 31% intend to use Java, and 39% C#, the remaining 30% are not described. The reason: '"As they leave Visual Basic 6.0 behind, developers are choosing languages that help them work more easily with emerging technologies such as wireless and Web services development," said Esther Schindler, senior analyst at Evans Data, in a statement.'"
Personally, I am moving to Python. Nothing against VB per say, but tired of paying for the MS IDE.
"Piter, too, is dead."
As much as I dislike VB and its ability to suck my will to live I would still use it to throw together something real quick that requires a gui of sorts. Its embarrassing to even admit that I've used it before though. Anyone have any suggestions for something else I could use?
this is the most important sig ever! In your face 446154!
Cue many trolls writing "Visual Basic is DYING" posts
As long as all these migrating programmers stay with java and other rubberhead-safe languages and stay away from the lurking dangers of buffer-overruns and c... I guess the world is just about the same...
Must say tho' VB seems like a good RAD-tool
Yawn. Let me know when they've actually switched. If you took a survey here two years ago we'd have been 75% Java soon. Yet here we are, two years later, and it's more like 5%.
Here's the other scary thing: 52% OF 600 PROGRAMMERS ARE USING VB???!!! Not all of them intend to switch??? Let's hope that's not a representative sample.
There are no trolls. There are no trees out here.
Thats what I read too. The news I think is that not many of the people are going to be moving to VB.Net. The numbers are thrown around rather confusingly though. 57% of the 52% of the programmers who are VB developers plan to stick with VB. 33% of those will be moving to VB.Net So whats it all mean? Nothing really. A lot of people can't take the time to move their apps to VB.Net b/c of the syntax changes and given the choice they would rather try to learn C# than VB.Net most likely because its more hot and trendy. .Net platform. It kind of leaves you with the feeling that you are programming in Frankenstein.Net. So would I advocate moving to C# instead for my company? The answer is no and the reason is that most of the pc programmers in my company (not a software dev shop) barely know what an object is let alone how to make one. MS has done them a favor in VB.Net and made it compatible enough that they can continue to program the same way they used to in VB6.
Personally I've used VB.Net and think the syntax changes just feel bolted on. Some of it gives you improved features and other changes neuter parts of the language in order to conform to the
In Republican America phones tap you.
I just loved this part
"Of those developers who said they would stick
with Visual Basic, one-third said they plan to upgrade to the latest version, called VB.Net."
So of the developers who liked VB and intended to continue using it, two thirds plan on not continuing to use the same tools forever? They just see themselving cranking out serpenting procedural code with no option explicit, late binding object references and using one character variable names for as long as they can possibly get away with it?
Hmmmm... sounds like government work to me.
But seriously. VB is a huge product no longer being developed. Of course people will use something else. What the heck else are they going to do?
www.avacal.com -- the home page of pete shaw
I've had the fun of working with VB6 for years, and VB.Net does some things pretty well compared to former versions of the language. However, when you look around out there, other options are opening up.
.Net mandates wallowing through its packages, why *not pick up Java? If I've gotten to that level of complexity, I would opt for the cheapest way out - and Java and/or any other free language implementation + GUI will do the trick just fine.
The most exciting one I've been following is SharpDevelop + SWT. Throw Mono into the mix and you might see some commercial public programs that are cross-platform in nature. If Longhorn forces a rewrite of all the old code for Windows anyways, this combination looks very potent.
Java and Eclipse is the other end of the spectrum, and again, if SWT actually pays off, you will see a lot of people jump off.
I would *love* to see python + SWT merged together. That would be an absolute hoot.
Vanilla VB6 shielded you from the API unless you actually needed it (and you had to hack around to do anything out of the ordinary) - now that
However, since I work at a strict MS shop with a legacy VB6 app we just finished three years ago, it's going to be mild with nice breezes in hell before we move onward.
2005/2006 will be very interesting. Microsoft isn't innovating anything remarkable and Mono + Java have the potential to catch up in feature set. If Microsoft renders all former software broken (or forced through an emulator) AND pushes DRM, Linux might gain a foothold with *corporate* and *small business* support.
I am a VB6 programmer by trade, and it took me learning Python, C#, and VB.Net to undo my habits, plus a healthy dose of unit testing and extreme programming. Methodologies mean more than languages.
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