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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'd revolt too, given that their motivation is a sweaty man who seems to have a single word vocabulary.
Does VB6 not work, all of a sudden?
"strand" programmers that have not trained in newer languages.
Listen, if you're a programmer who is only proficient in VB 5 and 6, its time to think about moving into another occupation. I suggest becoming a cab driver or farmer.
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MS-DOS programmers upset that QBASIC will no longer be supported under Longhorn, afraid of being stranded since they never learned any other languages. Rest of programmers glad to see them gone.
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a series of recipes for developing applications without any theory or background information, and now their recipes are outdated.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.
I am so used to Free Software that such problems seem almost unbelievable. It must be really frustrating to be so dependent on one company who can render your skill set irrelevant by one decision. You might say: isn't it possible for FSF to stop supporting GCC? Of course it is. But the point is that they cannot make it illegal for others to support. Just imagine how much more productive the time spent by those revolting developers would be if they were allowed to support that project themselves. But they are not. They have to beg or threaten Microsoft to support it for them. And that is just not a good business strategy in the long run, when eventually all of the products meet the end of line time. Sad.
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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Can I have your stuff?
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.
Sounds to me like Microsoft refuses to kill off VB, and those who know its horrors best are demanding that it be extinguished so that another generation of programmers will not have to endure what they have gone through.
I can respect that.
Quantum materiae materietur marmota monax si marmota monax materiam possit materiari?
Slashdot readers have even less sympathy for whiny VB programmer than Microsoft!
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
Slashdot readers have even less respect for whiny VB programmers than for Microsoft!
I'm sorry, but if you're a programmer and you're worried about your ability to program outside of VB6, you deserve to lose your job.
Sheesh, pleading with MS to prop up your job via the only thing you've ever bothered to learn.
There is no thing as a programmer who can only work in one language. People who can only use VB6 exclusively, I hate to break the news to you but, you're not programmers.
Besides, there are way better options now for new development, and any legacy support can still be done with existing tools. MS is not coming to your door to remove all VB6 tools from your machines for christ sakes.
Damned, if any of my programmers came to me bitching about this I'd likely fire them immediately.
No Comment.
wait for it...
wait...
Nope, sorry, I just don't care. I tried my best, but I can't do it.
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.
I remember sweaty, frightened, forty-year old guys in suits (really bad polyester suits) who were trying to get into microcomputer jobs when I was just starting out as a professional.
The were mainframe people, and mainframes were drying up, at the time, and they knew nothing about microcomputers. They had been doing the same thing for years, and they didn't know what to do. They looked like a deer in headlights.
Interviewing them, they kept trying to use mainframe concepts to answer questions about microcomputers. They were... not a good fit. I don't know what happened to those people -- we stopped seeing them after a few years.
The VB folks seem like the same sort of problem. It's an object lesson on not getting tightly bounc to just one thing.
That's an amazing feat. Microsoft's MVP directory lists only 111 in the VB section. http://www.microsoft.com/communities/MVP/MVP.mspx
Maybe some are hanging out in the ASP (vbscript) or Office (vba) sections.
"Seriously, how much different is the new VB.Net?" It's pretty much the same as C# but no braces for code blocks, and you declare variables with the "As" keyword.
So basically it kind of looks like VB, but you can actually do something with it. It's different enough a lot of VB programmers fail to grasp it simply because they've had their hand held for so long with no desire to actually learn any other languages or do anything past the most simple of applications. Note that I said a lot, not all.
In this case they are right to object. VB.Net is not the successor of VB6. VB.Net is simply C# with a different syntax. There is no smooth transition from VB6 to VB.Net. It is not a matter of learning a new syntax, it is a matter of having to a total new semantic. Companies that have invested 50 man year in the development of VB6 applications are now faced with the fact that they will require to trow in another 10 man year just to make the transition to VB.Net. It is simply the arrogancy of Microsoft here, I guess, that they think what is better for their customers than their customers do. It seems that only MS thinks that the .Net framework is a great success.
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
Now they're rebelling
If tyranny and oppression come to this land, it will be in the guise of fighting a foreign enemy. - James Madison
VB programmers are revolting ?
That's just mean....
I find VB revolting as well.
This isn't as much "normalization" as it is "don't take so many drugs when you're designing tables."
I would find it terribly degrading to have to beg a company to please let me continue to be a customer. How totally absurd.
> Kids coming into mainframe at entry level are making 40K,
That's pathetic. I made $45K at entry level for hacking perl. Probably because I worked at another job (support) where I made just slightly more, and I wouldn't take less. I was best qualified, they hired me. Sometimes it is what you know.
I guarantee that mainframe job has no advancement. 'course neither does hacking perl, but I've switched again to a job that's only technical in a secondary sense (business analyst). I have lots of choices. Mainframe guys see more of their hardware carted away every year.
I am no longer wasting my time with slashdot
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.
So Microsoft is saying they are not going to support it... So what? I've used VB for years (As well as other languages like any programmer worth their salt does), and I've never had to call in a support case to Microsoft concerning bugs in the language... Not once.
...Sounds like it's more of a political move on the part of MVP's who don't want their certification to become obsolete in the eyes of Micro$oft.
Any problems you would run into with VB are well documented on Newsgroups. Plus, the VB MVPs are complaining about not wanting to port existing code. So don't! If your application has been around for years, it's not going to stop working tomorrow because Microsoft says VB6 is a dead language.
What about switching to Real Basic? I have not used it myself, but some say it's pretty good compared to VB6. I don't know about full compatibility with VB either. But, it may be something to consider at least for new projects.
Table-ized A.I.