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.'"

Comments

Use it today

[DogDude]

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...

Re:Use it today

[gbjbaanb]

exactly, though I'm quite "meh" on VB6, it is still simple enough to slap something out in it in next to no time, and it works. Sure I'd like the IDE to improve and a couple of niggles to disappear, but hey - all languages have them, including .NET.

There was a thread on /. recently about teaching salespeople to code - in my experience you don't bother trying, you just give them a copy of VB6 and tell them to knock themselves out. Next thing you know, they've knocked up something that does what they want. Give them a copy of VS2012 and tell them to do the same thing using WPF front end with a C# WCF webservices remote service and they wouldn't be able to do it. And that pretty much sums up why VB6 is still with us and was so popular.

Re:Use it today

[iosq]

All well and good, but I think a VB6 application created by salespeople would be the sort of thing that you might see in the average slashdotters worst nightmare.

Re:Use it today

[Missing.Matter]

The guy is an idiot.

The guy used the tools he knows to get his work done. It might not be the most efficient way, but that doesn't make him an idiot, just ignorant. Maybe instead of being a dick you could educate him as to the more appropriate solution and why his is dangerous/inefficient?

Re:Use it today

[517714]

An idiot who gets things done is better than a genius who doesn't. If you are surprised at management's position, then your evaluation of who is the idiot is flawed.

What would be nice would be

[transporter_ii]

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.

Re:Might as well...

[jellomizer]

.NET thrive is because the Visual Studio IDE demands it, unless you are doing C++. The basic rule of thumb, if you are going to be writing programs for windows you use Visual Studio. Now .NET as a language isn't that bad, I actually like it. What I hate is the Virtual Machine nonsense, that only works on Windows Systems, yet it is still virtualized so it runs slow. It combines the worst attributes of the VB6 world and the Java World. If Visual Studio gave people a non .NET option for VB (a VB 7 per say) then I would expect VB 6 dyeing out and .NET wouldn't have caught on. It would have been an other J++

Java success is in the fact you can write code and run it nearly every modern system out there. And you code isn't scripted but in a way that can be closed source (Not all developers want their code Open Source) Also Java has a good set of quality IDEs Netbeans, Eclipse are a few of them, and they are really good at Java Coding.

Why do we want VB6 to die more then the others?
1. It is a platform for unstable applications. VB6 Apps have a tendencies of getting corrupted and random deaths where you need to reinstall them.
2. Visual Studio 6 needs to run on Newer OS's Windows 7 64 bit... Windows 8?
3. You cannot buy the media/licenses directly anymore. If you are going to grow you company you cannot stick on a tool where you cannot get legal licenses as your company grows.
4. Young Whipper Snappers don't want to use it. (We are at a point where we have a lot of software developers retiring) And we need to replace them with younger blood. The problem is the young guys do not want to use it.

Re:Might as well...

[benjfowler]

Java itself is a simple and clean language, and is not that bloated by current standards.

I think it gets a bad rap, because people think 'applets', or 'J2EE', or worse yet, the countless piles of crap foisted upon them at work, known as 'enterprise software'.

The objective reality, I think, is quite different from often-mistaken perception -- I've seen both garbage and masterpieces written in everything from Ruby, to VB6, to Java, to Perl. Depends on the programmer, not the tools or languages.

Re:Might as well...

[hairyfeet]

I just don't get why so many find it hard to believe VB 6 has such long legs. it did ONE job and it did that job fucking brilliantly, which was to make an easy to use GUI front end to a DB, that's it, that's all. This is what MSFT fucked up with with .NET because frankly ALL of the VB 6 I've seen being used and being built really was only variants on that one function.

What MSFT refused to accept was was how important one small function can be to an SMB or SOHO. There is a HELL of a lot of times a small business can use a custom GUI to a DB, everything from contacts to records can be kept in a simple DB that just needs an easy to use front end so the user doesn't have to know anything about DBs, just fill out the forms.

Finally all those "real" programmers that gnash their teeth at even the mention of the word VB? GET OVER IT, you wouldn't expect them to call a 'real"engineer when all they need is something that can be banged together out of an Erector set would you? of course not and it just so happens there is a hell of a lot of business jobs that don't need some full blown SQL DB just to get the job done. Its just like how we've all seen "applications" built out of VBA and Access, it has its little niche and as long as one doesn't try to build something outside of its little niche? Then its a perfectly valid tool.

MSFT failed with .NET because they assumed if you were doing job A that you would want to learn to have the power to do jobs B-K, when in reality frankly there were tons of guys that frankly only needed to do job A so B-K were simply overkill and pointless. That is why VB 6 has such long legs, frankly there hasn't been any other language that filled the SMB small DB niche quite as well as VB 6.