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Why Visual Basic 6 Still Thrives
theodp writes "Microsoft recently extended 'It Just Works' compatibility for Visual Basic 6 applications through the full lifetime of Windows 8, so VB6 apps will have at least 24 years of supported lifetime (VB6 shipped in '98). So why has VB6, 'the un-killable cockroach' in the Windows ecosystem, managed to thrive? 'Cockroaches are successful because they're simple,' explains David S. Platt. 'They do what they need to do for their ecological niche and no more. Visual Basic 6 did what its creators intended for its market niche: enable very rapid development of limited programs by programmers of lesser experience.' But when Microsoft proudly trotted out VB.NET, the 'full-fledged language' designed to turn VB6 'bus drivers' into 'fighter pilots,' they got a surprise. 'Almost all Visual Basic 6 programmers were content with what Visual Basic 6 did,' explains Platt. 'They were happy to be bus drivers: to leave the office at 5 p.m. (or 4:30 p.m. on a really nice day) instead of working until midnight; to play with their families on weekends instead of trudging back to the office; to sleep with their spouses instead of pulling another coding all-nighter and eating cold pizza for breakfast. They didn't lament the lack of operator overloading or polymorphism in Visual Basic 6, so they didn't say much.'"
Might as well have "why .NET still thrives", or "why Java still thrives" in the thread title.
I'm one of them. I still actively use it today. I know how to use it, and I never had any interest in learning .Net. I've got several mission-critical apps written in VB6, and I'm updating one of them right now. We have no plans to move to something else. If it ain't broke...
I don't respond to AC's.
A "just works" version of Windows, that MS sold support for, marketed toward businesses, that just stayed the same forever. As it is, MS makes its money on new versions. That's fine for MS, but bad for businesses that don't want to upgrade every four - six years. If MS made money selling a business copy of windows and then got a fair amount for support and updates on it perpetually, it would be win/win for businesses, developers, and MS.
Where I work at, we installed new systems in police stations in the last two years that were brand new and had Windows XP on them, because the software at the time didn't have Windows 7 drivers.
Doctors destroy health, lawyers destroy justice, universities destroy knowledge, religion destroys spirituality
The more the programmer's memory is loaded with language constructs and concepts, the less the programmer has for creating applications. High level languages are for people, low level ones are for machines. Both have limited abilities.
If you had VB5 and you got VB6 you could upgrade your app to a vb6 application very quickly and your program looked and worked just like it did before. .NET breaks all but the most basic application, and there is a lot of rework to be done. Often these VB6 apps are not the best design and, and you need to find a .NET compatible version of your third party tools, then they are probably quite different and you need to rework them again.
Upgrading you VB6 app into
Next you have the .NET framework. I write a program in visual studios 2010, Now I need to make decisions... Do I compile it for .net 2.0 and not have as many features but know that my system will work on most modern windows systems, or work on 4.5 and require all the users to upgrade their system? Why can't I just compile it into a static .EXE
Finally you have older developers. These guys are not Computer Scientists, They studied other fields and happened to learn computers, and started to program before a lot of the formalization in good form came into place. .NET seems unnecessarily restrictive to them. Why do you need to type all this extra crap. I need it to do this, why do I need System.Windows.Forms.PotatoGun.PopSound() instead of PlayPop Often these older developers are just maintaining the existing system that they have coded decades ago. So there is no real push to upgrade and give them a new project just because it needs to support .NET
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
Everyone involved with software development these days has surely heard of Ruby, and especially Ruby on Rails. Along with Cloud Computing and NoSQL, it was one of the most-hyped technologies of the past decade.
One of its core strengths is that it was supposed to allow relatively unskilled computer users to quickly create web apps. Much of the "hard work" was to be handled by Rails, including data access and the routing of web requests. In many ways, Ruby on Rails was claimed to be the Visual Basic of web development.
Unlike Visual Basic, however, we are seeing people fleeing from Ruby on Rails as fast as they can.
If I had to make a guess, I think it would be because of some of Rail's major problems. These include:
- it can be very slow
- it often doesn't scale well
- Ruby code quickly becomes unmaintainable, especially for large web apps, because it's a dynamically typed, interpreted language
- the community has archaic attitudes toward women
- people paying good money for web apps are quickly getting tired of the failed promises and shoddy work of so many Rails advocates and developers
While Visual Basic 6 apps usually aren't known for having the best or the most maintainable code, at least it doesn't bring along the numerous other problems that we see associated with Ruby on Rails. Perhaps this is why Visual Basic 6 has had some significant staying power, while Ruby on Rails is stagnating.
Less time that is; there's always a temptation to try and utilize all the bells and whistles in a programming language. Often this adds to complexity and makes the code harder to understand in one glance; polymorphism for example sucks if you only have sourcecode to figure out what's going on. I personally like C++, but I try to only use the parts which make life easier (and honestly stl for the most part is one of them, with a little study the basic stuff there goes a long way).
There are many projects, usually internal or niche market applications, which have decades of legacy code to keep the product running. This is not a choice of the developers or done out of laziness, this is what their employers have given them to work with.
If you have to rewrite vast amounts of code because the programming language is out dated, you will find that depending on the size of the project, the company who owns the project will be on the hook for millions of dollars to rewrite it so that it will work with modern environment.
If you are a company in placed in this position of having to rewrite everything, what is there to say that you are going to stay on the Microsoft ecosystem. You have emerging technologies in the enterprise (iOS/iPad/Objective-C), you have Web Applications and "Cloud Computing" (Which are platform independent and would most likely run on a non-Microsoft backend) and if you are a developer who just wants to get it working on the cheap (Where the market is vertical enough that the customer will use any platform you tell them to because they need to run your app) you could probably save a tonne of development cash by just making it run on WINE on GNU/Linux
Better for Microsoft to keep supporting developers who have their ecosystem running on Windows, as these applications directly translate into sales of Windows licenses. If Windows did not have compatibility, then Windows will be just like the rest.
Incidentally, this is why Windows on ARM Tablets will ultimately fail, as there is no compatibility with x86 apps unless it is 100% written in .NET or HTML5 (not that many out there in the whole Windows ecosystem).
VB6 was great for whipping up a quick app.
Sure there was a lot of crap written that helped give it a bad rep. But if you took the time, you could make some decent quality stuff much quicker than any other language at the time.
I often wonder though, if Microsoft doesn't want to develop a true VB7, why doesn't someone else?
Build a VB6 clone with all the mod cons, allow it to build native exe files like vb6 and you'd be on a winner you'd think.
With some modern touches, things like mousewheel support in the ide (nope vb6 does't have it :-), better networking, sound and graphical abilities it would win a lot of people over.
But the IDE is NOT supported if I read this correctly:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/vstudio/ms788708
Hard maintaining an environment without the IDE/compiler...
The reason VB6 is still around is that it is functionally identical to VBA, which is closely tied to office. .net does not work as well.
VB6 works well with COM based applications, whereas
VB6/VBA will still be around for as long as office is COM based.
Because you can make a GUI using Visual Basic and see if you can track an IP address.
VB6 is simple, but there is a surprisingly large amount of power to be tapped from it, if you understand the underlying infrastructure.
Having done some hard core COM programming 10 years ago, for a Computer Based Testing "test driver", our team learned we could spend 2 days to get up a "ActiveDoc" in C++ using ATL, and WTL, or we could do the same thing in VB6 within an hour. Considering how fast it was to implement ActiveDocument and custom COM interfaces, I changed my mind on how weak I perceived VB6 was. (Unfortunately many of the VB trained, customer-based implementors of our interface were not as astute, and even in a VB6 environment didn't understand what they needed to do to create a component that would properly talk to the rest of our system.)
Still, knowing how quickly VB6 would let one get up an interface, I was able to help a room mate of mine create a level editor for our own rolled version of Zelda. It was a little cumbersome to learn how to read individual bytes of the palette based sprite files, but VB6 had all the power there.
All that said, VB6 should die IMHO. After (C# / VB).NET came out, it became a lot easier to make object dynamically talk to each other and perform byte level manipulation.
I've been talking about this for years, and I've even been laughed at here on Slashdot for suggesting classical VB will never be going away. How could it? There is that lovely fully object oriented thingy called VB.Net? Why wouldn't you want to rewrite all your applications in it for no appreciable benefit whatsoever?
.Net that you could compile VB code into, but it's all too late for that now.
.Net applications and no one gives a flying fsck about Metro applications that Microsoft wants you to rewrite everything in...............AGAIN just so they can piss about with trying to amount to something on mobiles. Seriously Microsoft, no one gives a shit. Windows is a legacy application shell and nothing more.
The fact is that Visual Basic was and is used for what it was good at. Departmental and business applications where the overhead of that object oriented nonsense didn't make any sense at all. The fatal mistake that Microsoft made with VB.Net is that it was completely backwards incompatible (yes it is, and no, don't give me any of that 'compatibility' nonsense. It doesn't work, hence this article). You couldn't take a VB6 application, make a couple of changes and recompile it as you'd always been able to do. What they should have done was built a RAD environment on top of
Put simply, if Windows 8 couldn't run classical VB/COM applications no one, and I mean no one, in business would ever consider upgrading to it. Windows up to version 7 would have been virtualised forever. No one cares about
This "bus driver" has a PhD in computer science and in my weaker days wrote code that still exists in various linux distros. i started a company 15 years ago with some vb apps and, guess what.. the vb6 apps still sell. over $4 million per year with my staff of 5. So, you know, call me a "bus driver", call it a "scripting language", and any other insults you want - I can take it. Or rather, I just wont care.
try something complex and your beat. ...pay ..pay .pay some more hence why win 8 and 7 are just vista fixes and why xp is still so strong
the fact is hobbiests use it or other stuff cause they dont want to pay
I tried to install it on Windows 7 and it didn't work. So i gave up (programming for windows)
If Google really cared they would fix Android Chrome to reflow text, instead of discriminating
It's built in to Excel. We use it all the time to generate C code from massive tables of translation and configuration data.
I'd prefer lisp. I could do it through COM links or whatever the kids call it nowadays but it works and is convenient.
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
The company I work for has a well-staffed IT shop, but the one thing we are lacking is anyone with real developer experience. We have one woman there who is known as the "database developer", but all her experience comes from Access. Access front-ends to SQL databases, that sort of thing. It works for the most part, but it's frustrating from our perspective when we have to deal with all these Access databases/front ends, and we know things could be so much better.
A few times they've tried to send her to VB training of various kinds, and as the resident SQL "expert" and the one that works most closely with her, I've tried to steer her in the right direction. She's willing, but it's clear at this point she just doesn't have the skillset required to make the leap to "real" developer. This is a state job, however, so just letting someone go for such reasons is a convoluted enough process that it's probably not going to happen so long as she continues to be competent in the Access world she's created for us.
I'm damn tempted to see if I can get a copy of VB6 from MSDN or some other source and throw it in front of her, see what happens. I've got 0 VB experience myself, but from reading the descriptions it does seem like she might be able to embrace it. I've seen the behind the scenes coding/scripting she writes in these Access front-ends, and it really seems like she is doing a lot of what Visual Basic would require, but she just can't retrain her brain to deal with VB10 or whatever.
Is this a mistake? Our needs aren't anything special, just "Go get this SQL data and show it to the user, maybe let them edit it" type stuff. If I had any kind of time I know I could probably teach myself enough VB to do this, and I've been tempted a couple times just to pad the old resume, but it always gets put into the "Yeah, someday" file.
Any language that uses a newline as a statement terminator is demented.
VB6 won't die because the tool is geared to answer the problem "how do I get people to develop applications to solve problems themselves" and not "how do I make professional developers more productive and happy". VB6 solves a very broad problem whereas most other computer languages, IDEs and frameworks are geared for those who program for a living. And unfortunately, there really is no alternative. The fact that there are a lot of programmers today who grew into the profession who weren't programmers initially is not the point. VB6 is a tool that empowers a much wider audience to do their own thing than do "modern" programming languages.
VB.NET is more of a computer language that was wrapped around the .NET framework to try to "wean" VB programmers off of VB6. It won't work. You don't "get" what VB6 does for people if you think that. And it seems Microsoft simply doesn't get it either.
I taught myself VB6 (fool for a teacher?) about ten years ago mainly so I could write small apps and utilites for myself. Combined with Win32 api calls, it's been powerful enough for almost everything I've needed to do. True, my code isn't elegant but it gets the job done.
For a more modern object oriented language I think Lazarus (an open source Delphi clone) is in the same category as VB6. I found it easy to move from VB6 to Lazarus since the IDEs are similar. Lazarus is based on Pascal so some might consider it inelegant but it too gets the job done and the cost sure is right.
Now, John Lennon. He's living in Hoboken, and works menial jobs (no, he's not a VB6 programmer). He used to own a record store. Check out the paper next time you come through. And, no, you talk funny.
I've done MANY "enterprise class" mission critical systems in VB6 (about 32 since 1994 professionally), scaling up to 1++ million lines of code in VB alone (not counting SQL Stored Procs & what-not that go with those) talking "cross-platform" to various database engines (usually IBM DB/2, Oracle, or SQLServer & at times, thru Citrix or Terminal Server as well, which has "caveats" in loops (don't use DoEvents, but rather rely on the API it's based directly on, in Sleep)).
It just works, and with the least failure rates on projects (as opposed to C/C++ ones of the same general nature for information systems).
I agree on ActiveDocuments, because moving "std. VB" projects to it was pretty much a snap using wizards for it too (not always perfect, but didn't mean a lot of tweaking either, IF it was needed @ all), so your apps because "web apps" vs. std. Windows forms ones...
APK
P.S.=> I moved onto Borland Delphi & C++ Builder around 1997 when I saw Delphi 3.0 "knock-the-chocolate" out of BOTH VB5, MSVC++ 5.0, & Java (Symantec version), & BIGTIME (doubled even C++ in both Strings + Math work, which ALL programs do some of no less), it's just BETTER imo & the results showed it in (of all places, a competing language trade-rag's pages) Visual Basic Programmer's Journal Sept./Oct. 1997 issue "INSIDE THE VB5 COMPILER"...
However, I can never say that doing a job in VB (or .NET later) was a "bad move" due to ease-of-use & language features - it works... and gets the job done. I also saw MORE JOBS in Microsoft related IDE work in Visual Studio over that timeframe (1994-current professionally here) than I did for ANY other competing language/vendor too. That's just how it is... management, even though I showed them the article I spoke of, said:
"Microsoft is here today, the big dog - they have the money, they will survive + provide support... will its competing languages like Delphi or C++ Builder from Borland?"
I had to concede THAT, but, from a "business standpoint" point-of-view.
Still, in the end - I would & always HAVE, RATHER use a statically compiled system (meaning "stand-alone" single-exe work IF/when possible, due to less moving parts to account for like runtimes or external libs/activeX-OLEServer object controls above & beyond the std. API libs Microsoft provides that all apps use/depend on for functions (or even classes for them)) - vs. a runtime interpreter driven system, such as VB (or .NET, or JAVA even & to some extent, even MSVC++ because iirc, it's visual control interfaces are lib driven too)
... apk
I'm one of those people that grew up in the 8-bit days and learned some basic back then. When I picked up vb4/5/6 I was able to create working programs with a nice GUI immediately! I have tried many other languages since, but somehow the step is so huge from basic to anything object oriented , I just can't grasp it. I have tried books videos, etc. I'm just too stuck in my way of thinking. .net I get weird problems like the executable won't run from a network drive without giving some strange warning.
I'll stick with vb6, when I make stuff with
Lack of support for unicode, auto-layout, DPI-scaling, double-buffering, animations, hardware-accelerated vector drawing, etc, etc.
In short, it's plain, dull, boring, and utterly unexciting to develop apps with.
Recently I started looking at the Raspberry Pi, with the idea that I might use it to teach my child to program. One of the first questions that arose was "Which Language". I decided that I needed a simple, straight forward language that could also produce GUIs - in essence what I wanted was the equivalent of VB6 for Linux. Why? Well it was simple to learn, easy to produce a simple UI and link them together with some back end code. That was always the strength of VB6. It was a great tool for what it did and somehow Microsoft lost sight of that.
In the end, I went with Python3 and QT4. It has those features (maybe not in quite such an all-in-one package), is free and can be cross platform as well.
I loved VB6 and beat it death. For knocking out a quick application it was hard to beat. I long left it behind (at least a decade ago) but when I started developing iOS apps a while back I was so disappointed with the interface builder that it made me angry; they obviously never understood the joys of the VB6. I hate to say it but the whole interface builder was more of a rip off of the later c#.net interface in Visual Studio that drove me away from all things Microsoft. Thus in my present apps I don't use interface builder and just use all code building on things such as cocos2d.
.nets made the claim that you could do anything. But the reality was that every project seemed to follow the same cycle. 90% done in under a week and then the next two months was spent fighting with .net as you backtracked out of something it did poorly and then implemented it yourself.
As a side note I do love XCode and it seems that the non IB parts of XCode have been kept as separate from IB as possible so that people who want to ignore it can do so with ease.
While VB6 is and should be a historical artifact IDE builders could still learn a thing or two from it. Its key strentgh was that it seemed to know its weaknesses. It did what it did well and beyond that you had to instantly jump to lower level screen interfaces like GDI. Whereas the later
I still use it every day. I can do everything I want and need to do with it. That being said - I do have VS 2010 on a test machine and play around with it a little. I know I will have to make the jump at some point. I will see how it goes.
Sometimes it's nice to be able to just throw together an application quickly. No mess, no worrying about pointers, just put the pieces together and have it work. VB on Windows and Gambas on Linux allow people to do that. I can program in many different languages ranging from Assembly to PHP, but I believe in using the right tool for the job. If the job is getting something up and running quickly with a graphical interface then VB/Gambas is a good option.
Have you actually used Java in the past 4-5 years? It's quite fast these days. Heard of JBoss? --- Quicker than whatever .NET shit you're running.
I can't tell if you're some Microsoft covert marketing hound or a troll. You could also be retarded. I'd get that checked out.
If you still use Visual Basic 6 or remember it fondly, you should consider Real Studio. It has the philosophy of "simple things should be simple, complex things should be possible". We continually get VB6 developers that decide to move to Real Studio rather than switch to the current complex Microsoft ecosystem. Real Studio is as accessible as VB6, but is as object-oriented as VB.NET. Plus it creates cross-platform applications. Check it out: http://www.realsoftware.com/
Mister Platt is just a moron, and shouldn't be teaching if he doesn't know how to use a language..
One of the complaints is about ugly code, well you can write ugly code in ANY language, it's all up to the developer.. Another complaint by this moron is about 'On error resume next', well what's different to that as using:
Try
Call AFunction
Catch
End Try
It's exactly the same, and you don't have to use it... You can write about the same exception handling as you can in VB.NET..
And if you can't do it in 10 minutes, than maybe you should be patient and rethink or learn to use VB6 beyond the 'VB6 for dummies' level..
You can do very advanced stuff with VB6, YES you can also do multithreading if you want to, but debugging will be a bit harder and you shouldn't mind having the IDE crash (it's not like VS.NET IDE doesn't crash ever)..
If only they released the actual VB7 which was according to insiders only a few months away from a RC, and which would have had real OO like real Inheritance and function overloading.. Yes VB6 is getting old, but it has better long-term support from MS than a newby tech like Silverlight.. Ofcourse if you have to start a new (big) project you would be a moron to start it in VB6, but we still have a lot of legacy applications which still do the job they were designed for and no real need to upgrade it to any fancy UI/modern language.. Hell C# is the new VB...
So you feel that typing curly braces to let the compiler know what you want somehow makes for better code?
Perhaps it is just that you don't know any non C syntax languages. I do and after writing something like python then jumping into a c or c++ app it takes me days to get over having to type a bunch of cruft.
Got Code?
VB6 programmers are just lazy.
...and people have been going on and on about how great it is to build apps with HTML5.
HTML5 + JS IS cool.
HTML5 + JS IS much better than HTML + JS used to be.
HTML5 + JS IS still an awful way to develop software.
C++Builder is another dev tool in the same boat as Visual Basic (and perhaps Delphi too) that has been around a long time and is still going strong. The C++ compiler isn't the best one out there and not the most standards compliant, but it's still a full C++ compiler, and developing Windows-based GUIs is just as fast as Visual Basic 6 or .Net. You have a rapid GUI development tool combined with a powerful language, a simple and straightforward IDE, and the runtime does not weigh down the application like .NET or Java. I wrote my first application with this tool back in the late 1990's, still supporting it today, with most of the original code still in existence. The application framework that the code is based on, the VCL (visual component library), has been very stable throughout many new versions of the tool, and I have never had to worry about a complete re-write of the application as a result of a new version of the language or tool.
They didn't lament the lack of operator overloading or polymorphism in Visual Basic 6, so they didn't say much
The summary is wrong: Visual Basic has polymorphism, it's the inheritance that is clunked. Google it, or enter here.
If timothy et al. don't know the language and environment, of course they won't understand the power of the little beast.
I don't agree with your death sentence, though. As years pass and I test language after language and environment after environment, I've come to respect the quick approach over the nice or correct one.
I rarely respond to comments. Also, don't ask for clarifications: a brain and Google are faster, believe me!
I just deployed an update to one of the VB6 applications that I've been supporting for many years. That one, like most of the others, still works for what the customers want.
I would really like to convert those apps to .NET, or Java, or just about anything else. But it's an effort that, while it would help me, I can't really sell to the customers. It would be costly for them (hey - I can comp some time but can't do it all for free), as well as possibly introduce some new bugs (there's a lot of code in there), require time from them for testing and possible interface changes, etc. They just don't see enough advantages to want to do it.
So of course I have to keep some Windows XP VMs around so I can work on those apps. VB applications may run fine in Windows 7 (and presumably will on Windows 8, according to TFA), but the IDE does NOT. I don't remember all the issues I ran into (maybe it had something to do with the controls being used), but it simply doesn't work.
So, yea, it won't die, it will be around for a long time. But at least from my perspective, it has NOTHING to do with the developers not wanting to move on. It's a business decision. And business has almost no incentive to decide on change.
"Somebody has to do something. It's just incredibly pathetic it has to be us."
--- Jerry Garcia
It's too bad that Delphi didn't win out. It was a much better language/environment that VB6.
Zoid.com
"It just works"
Do date, there really isn't any IDE/Language that has targeted this audience of people who wanted to do RAD in this visual manner.
Wrong. There's Delphi. Say what you want about Pascal or OOP, but it is just as easy to program with as VB, it has an extensive third party component selection being actively developed (to do whatever you want, from serial communication to image processing and GUI components) and it is, somehow, still being sold and supported.
When .NET came around, its users were praising the ease of GUI development, something that Borland users already became accustomed to during the previous 10 years or more (with both Delphi and C++ Builder). With no dynamic libraries or virtual machines to depend on, every executable runs natively with the visual component library -- VCL -- that can be statically compiled in it.
Unfortunately tho, Borland changed its business focus and sold the whole thing (except the VCL) to CodeGear. The new VCL developed by CodeGear is meant to be compatible with the old Borland one, but it still has compatibility problems and, in general, is bigger. The last Borland-produced version of Delphi is the 2006 one and that's what I'm still using today for quick drag and drop GUI projects (when there's no need to spend more than 5 minutes drawing a GUI). And I know several people making tons of money selling and developing DB based programs with versions even older (Delphi was originally developed to provide an easy to use interface to DBs, that's why it is named after an "oracle").
This is amusing for anyone who has been a been in development for a long time: it's far more important that an application correctly implement useful business logic than the tools and languages used to express it. Hence, continuously operating COBOL initially written in the mid-80's still in use in many large businesses.
VB 6 is probably a better language for modest applications than Perl, TCL, or PHP. We're not making much forward progress here.
Web apps are more fun than VB6? At least in VB6 you could make the screen do almost anything you imagine with a few clicks. With web apps you are stuck with the page flow of HTML-related "standards", or else use JavaScript that probably breaks on some browser version or vendor you haven't tested, and looks jittery and forced.
The ability to make dialog boxes or help/wizard/lookup screens pop up anywhere for any reason is what made VB pleasurable: one's design GUI imagination can be satisfied without fuss and muss. The web is too restrictive.
I've been pushing for a desktop-like GUI standard over HTTP, tossing HTML and starting over in order to get a real GUI flow and screens. A GUI browser.
And coordinate-based positioning saves a hell of a lot of time and frustration. Auto-flow just doesn't control esthetics well: it's too dumb to know what "looks good" to humans. Auto-flow is an idea that looks good on paper, but is a time-sucker in practice.
VB-classic just plain hit on something that cannot be denied. (Some if it copied from HyperCard.)
Table-ized A.I.
It seems to me that there would be a good business opportunity for a company to make their own VB6 compiler and provide long-term support even after Microsoft drops it. Clearly the market doesn't want VB6 to go away, but one of the drawbacks of closed source is that one company can jerk people around like this.
Amen! GUI programming in browsers is a royal pain the booty. Time to blow it up and start over.
Yes, I know I got the acronym wrong. Twice.
'enable very rapid development of limited programs by programmers of lesser experience.' '
Which then turn into unkillable custom full fledged enterprise monstrosities.
Another thing I've not noticed here in the comments is performance. VB6 back in the day wasn't a speed demon execution speed wise when you look at how quickly the run-time ran. I remember seeing it first on a Pentium-90 with 24Mb RAM and NT4.0 back in the 90's. Now days on a VM with two cores fed to it (the second is purely for giggles), that same unchanged code is thumpnig through tens of gigabytes of data in the same time the Pentium90 Digital Prioris would wander through in a couple of hours. I would now consider it "lean" and it's allowed data requirements to really blow out. So, in summary:
"Just works"
"Still usable"
"Screams"
Personally, my background is C/C++, ASM and COBOL (VMS/Mainframe) .. but I have to give some regard and respect to applications created in the mid to late 90's on vb4-vb6 that you can still run today, and run WELL.
All those nerds thinking that syntax represents power.
Any turing complete language will be able to do anything that any other turing complete language can.
The rest is marketing jargon.
You understand that the moment you write your first interpreter/compiler.
Summary: VB6 / VBA plus Access requires no support from the system administrator.
You have a sys admin who is solely interested in keeping his network up and running. You're in a department with little or no budget for development, but a need for database apps. System administrator has no interest in letting you touch his servers. And has no ability to develop apps. So you build a a VB / Access app, put the Access file on a shared network drive with other files, send the link to users, and voila, problem solved. An app which fills a real need.
This is probably not an uncommon situation in non-IT-oriented organizations.
All you visual basic folks should at least try Real Studio. A nice compact environment that lets you cross compile to Mac, Windows and Linux. Not perfect, but productive and fun to work in
Is it like the BASIC I used in high school? I liked that language, especially with its PEEKs an POKEs. That's the problem with languages today, no POKE, no GOTO, no CLS these damn kids think it's all objects and # and ternary mumbo jumbo. BAH!!! Give me a Z80A and a case of Cheerwine and I'll show you how it's done. Now GET(OFF_MY_LAWN)!
There are many examples of this in the programming world. When AS3 was rolled out many coders thought it would change the web forever. It's an extremely viable, Java-like platform for web development. But it didn't fly. Most Flash developers stuck with the far more simplistic AS2 and ignored everything that came afterwards.
------ The best brain training is now totally free : )
VB6 users don't know about Real Basic?
All of my video games' first versions (now in Android) were done in VB6 with directX 7. 2d graphics (even some 3d) that take the screen and buffer for themselves. Seamless! Sure shoulda been done in C++, but I was teaching VB at the time and did it during class time. :-o
Just like Einstein said "Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler." this goes equally well when choosing the language in which to implement a solution. Let's face it every language has many pros and cons, it ultimately comes down to the developer performing their craft at ever increasing experience levels. Continually honing their skills and perfecting their abilities to become the best at their craft that they are capable of becoming.