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Visual Basic Developers Revolt Against Microsoft
daria42 writes "More than 100 Microsoft Most Valuable Professional (MVP) developers have signed a petition demanding the software company reconsider plans to end support for Visual Basic in its "classic" form. Developers claim the move could kill development on millions of Visual Basic 6 (VB6) applications and "strand" programmers that have not trained in newer languages."
I think you need greater inteligence to become a farmer.
Stuff gets old as time goes by and tends to be replaced. This is just a testament to the way those VB developers have been educated - they have been handed a series of recipes for developing applications without any theory or background information, and now their recipes are outdated. They're trying to swim in the wake of a new language (or, in the case of VB.NET, a new interface and toolset for the same syntactical language), and all they can think of doing is scream for help and flail around wildly hoping someone else will fix the situation. Languages evolve. Life goes on. It's the nature of the industry.
... of a proprietary-source based community.
Singularity: a belief in the "God" idea with the "demiurge" relation inverted.
Like MS cares. They have spent a huge amount of money developing .net and c#, and now thay want cash to try and staunch the bleeding. Not that they cannot afford to lose money, but they don't want to lose money if they can help it. besides, if visual basic is the only language you know, can you really call yourself a programmer? I don't think so.
Ross Winn "not just another ugly face..."
This is a problem with some developers they get too comfortable and don't want to learn anything new, and they don't want to loose their job. I have a friend who works with many people like this. They are horrible developers and don't want to learn .NET, because it scares them. From stories that he has told me they shouldn't be programming VB6 code much less programming a VCR. So I am not sure if putting these guys out of work is such a bad thing.
.Net or move into PHP, Java, Pyton, etc.
Also why should Microsoft continue to support a language that they are no longer developing, or using, or plan on using. They have moved into a new area of development, over 3 years ago. The developers that use VB6 had plenty of time to learn
Stop whining...
...but to be realistic, Microsoft can't continue to support everyone forever. They've added an EOL for VB 6, and they have an upgrade path (yes, it will be difficult) to the better languages they're using now.
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Besides, we're talking about Visual Basic! VB programmers who complain about having to do more work and learn more stuff deserve to have their jobs outsourced.
And the men who hold high places must be the ones who start
To mold a new reality... closer to the heart
VB6 is crap. Not a truly OO language. Your hands are tied to a bunch of high level commands and if you want more features you need to download - sorry BUY - a lot of nonsensical components.
... or you can write your own components. But unfortunatly the average VB6 programmer doesn't know how to do that.
... and if they did know how to do that, then they'd use C to write those components.
... which would kill any reason why you should use VB6.
So VB6 is crap.
VB.NET rules. Why? Because it's a wrapper around C#. And C# rules.
Y
Microsoft could open-source VB6. This is a perfect opportunity for them to show that they are truly open. The community could maintain VB6 for as long as they want, and Microsoft could be hands-free. You wanna code in our old dead language? Go for it. Just maintain it yourself.
I suppose they won't do that because it would bring competition to Microsoft that they don't want. It would be interesting to see what someone would do with it. Maybe make a new language?
My first paid programming work was to write an off-line chemical process schedule optimisation and inventory management application in VB6/VBA. I still shudder everytime I think about it.
Why would anyone miss that language? Let alone bother to sign a petition to save it. If your job relies entirely on a language that your average 12 year old can pick up in a week or two, you're in trouble.
- Based your entire programming career on Visual Basic
- Built your company's core product using Visual Basic
- Integrated Visual Basic into any mission critical system.
and did not provide a migration path, you deserve what you get.This has nothing to do with whether VB is good or bad -- pay your money and take your choice. What it has to do without is forced conversion of large numbers of apps for which VB.Net provides no added value. Cost of conversion is significant, since VB.Net is not backward compatible with earlier versions. VB.Net also requires .Net runtime, which is ~23MB -- adding to deployment issues.
Dropping support for VB clearly benefits MS, but just as clearly does not benefit users -- since when is this a good thing?
I hope there are no OO purists armed with mod points reading this, but VB is actually pretty decent, at the end of the day, for things like rapid development, interface prototyping, etc. All things being equal, VB is *easy*, and sometimes you just want easy. Yes, you can be easy in any language, but to the non-programmer, VB was the ultimate double-click and get started tool. Learn a few concepts about forms and controls, and you're pretty much set (who here knows VB and hasn't seen an app where every single line of code was crammed into the form, narray a module in sight).
.EXE and vbrun300.dll) they came back with suggestions/bugs and before I knew it, I moved "up and out" and became a professional C++/Oracle developer. Not everyone who works with VB becomes a programmer with a capital P, but some do, and some are simply happy to have scratched that particular itch and glad it came off so easily.
.net framework on every copy of windows forever, but try to wrap your head around the classes and concepts if you're not already familar with them. VB dispensed with all of that and was just what it was.
VB allowed me to write my first app: a little one-screen program that calculated exposure times for pinhole cameras (in VB3). Knew zilch about programming at the time, but I was able to slap it together and it worked. The code was absolutely horrible and for such a simple thing, it had bugs simply because I didn't know what I was doing. When I gave it out to a few people (just the
VB6, honestly, is the only tool I can think of that retains that ease of use with a very forgiving nature ("don't worry about declaring your variables...we'll trust you") to allow the uninitiated a chance to come up with something that may be only for him or her, or becomes the next killer app. If I were starting today, looking for something to write my little pinhole calc app, what would I use? VS.net? I wouldn't know what project to start with. Java? Sure, what IDE? Python/Ruby/Perl? All good, but if I only have Windowz, and am not a programmer, I may not know they exist. I knew VB existed because quickbasic was already on the machine, and the high school student working at Software etc. knew to point me at the VB box when I said "well, I know qbasic, but I'm looking for something to run under this Windows thing..."
That is my only justification for really liking VB, even after all these years; sometimes you just want the functionality and don't care how it looks and it needs to be done fast (and hopefully with a minimal runtime if it's going to moved to another machine). MS is free to put the
Just taking a guess here, but it could be less about programmers propping up their job, and more about the companies they work for having to deal with a whole lot of clients who are now faced with no support for the applications they've been given. I'm not saying VB is at all superior to more modern languages out there, but I've been involved in a lot of contracts where this kind of thing has happened and it's not pretty, especially when clients are told they might need their applications redeveloped.
"I'm a leaf on the wind. Watch how I soar."
-Hoban Washburn
Damned, if any of my programmers came to me bitching about this I'd likely fire them immediately.
.NET. I am quite sure they don't give a damn whether you think you can fire them or not, they probably employ a lot more people than you do.
The people complaining are owners of a lot of code that won't work under
The knee jerks here go on and on about coding skills, but it's the code base that quits working natively unless rewritten that is what is being fought to protect, in other words, a lot of investment. Money.
I don't code VB, but back in the day I wrote some big systems in DOS Compiled Basic, it's predecessor, which did the job well.
Nevertheless I convinced a Fortune 200 when I was there to use Delphi instead of VB, which raised all kinds of havoc. The Microsoft Certifieds walked. But Delphi was the right choice.
I guess Microsoft hired away the Delphi team, wrote C#, and now the Microsofties say C# rules.
Go figure.
rd
I would find it terribly degrading to have to beg a company to please let me continue to be a customer. How totally absurd.
"As a C/C++ developer finding it hard to get a job at a time when everybody under the sun wants java or EXPERIENCED C# programmers, I'm not very sympathetic to their concerns of being stranded with obsolete skills."
You should be the first guy to be sympathetic since you had similiar problems. Talk about bad Karma!
"I wouldn't call anything I've written in VB 6 a full blown "application",... they're more or less VBS scripts with an EXE extension."
I have a practical definition. Any program that makes money is a full blown application in my book. I'll let those with less experince debate which language is better.
Do you think the code will just convert itself for free? Many of the people complaining are justified. They are developing and/or running enterprise VB programs for a company. This means many many man hours to re-write,test, implement the new code just to get it back to where it was prior to MS dropping support. To Joe home user, it's easy to say "who cares, learn a new language and get a new job" but with comments like that you lose focus at who has the most to lose. The companies using VB6. It will most likely be costly to them to make the change and viewed by many as an unneeded expenditure since, as the petition shows, phasing out VB6 is not needed or welcomed.
"It's better to be a pirate then join the Navy"
As many have already pointed out, many companies have quite a bit of capital investment in VB code (now "legacy" it seems), just as, so they say, 80%-90% of the business applications are written in COBOL. Who'd have thunk we'd still be running apps written in the '60s to get work done, and thus run into the Y2K issue? This is what many other posters apparently don't get, most likely they are in the comfortable situation of being able to chose their own language, OS, requirements etc, or a not coders at all.
The other point is that many many apps are still written in C, best example is Linux, Windows, etc. There was a recent post by Richard Grimes, in his last article about .NET in which he proposed that Microsoft did not have confidence in .NET because they weren't using it to write their own apps (Office, etc), i.e. eat their own dog food. (I don't have the link, check www.theserverside.com)
Many posters correctly pointed out this is no small feat, and why should Msft rewrite working apps in the "new, new" language?
I'm sure there is just as much criticisim against C as there is against VB, in fact, VB is actually quite "C" like. Therefore, just as Ken Silverman is free to write stuff in QBASIC and expect it to work, so should VB coders. In this is the opinion the VB folks are expressing, no doubt Msft will back off.
This is the disadvantage of having to support legacy stuff, but like or not Msft has to, otherwise they will lose the confidence of companies who want return on investment, and not have to rewrite their code every year, especially when Msft decides to scrap .NET or what have you.
I think they are entirely justified in their revolt. It's not about them and their lack of willingness to learn a new language. I am willing to give them some credit. Rather this is indicative of the common historical practice of turning everything over every 5 years.
Microsoft is within their rights to do whatever they want. It's THEIR language. Remember the previous rant on Slashdot about sharecroppers?:
"A farmer who works a farm owned by someone else. The owner provides the land, seed, and tools exchange for part of the crops and goods produced on the farm.
Microsoft wants to own it all, and they want you and I to pay for what they own. If these programmers really want to revolt, then join the ranks of the Open Source movement rather than bellyaching about how mean their ruler is.
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When developing a commercial application you often have no other choice than to select from the available tools if you want to finish your application before your competor does. And most often you are quit restricted in your choices, if you want to deliver fast and cheap. It is very difficult to look in the future, and often the people managing software development are not aware of the fact that every "short time" decision often has "long term" effects. The name software is very misleading, because over and over again reality proofs that "software" is much harder than "hardware". The hardware we have is completely different from the one that we had ten years ago. Everything has changed. It is relatively cheap to change hardware, even to change hardware interfaces, compared to the cost of changing software to another development platform.
Yeah, and I shouldn't have to work for a living. I'm sorry, I didn't make the rules, I just play by them because I don't want to starve to death.
Okay, how about this: you claim to be a carpenter. Someone hires you to build a bookshelf. You can't get any screws because the store is out of them, but all you know how to use is a screwdriver. The customer doesn't care, he just wants his bookshelf and tells you to use a hammer and nails. You whine that "I shouldn't *have* to learn how to use a hammer!". You aren't really a carpenter. Replace "carpenter" with "software engineer", "screwdriver" with "VB6" and "hammer" with "another programming language".
Sure they have a choice. Learn a new language or get a job with a company that will continue to use VB6. No, they aren't considered as expendable, they've basically been told "Sorry, your favorite tool will no longer be supported. Try our new shiny tool!" Which if they had just chosen a tool whose destiny wasn't ordained by a third party they have no control over, they wouldn't have this problem.
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