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Microsoft Urged to Open Source Classic Visual Basic (i-programmer.info)
"On the 25th anniversary of classic Visual Basic, return it to its programmers..." reads the plea at UserVoice.com from Sue Gee -- drawing 85 upvotes. "The new Microsoft claims to back open source, why not in this case? There is no need for Microsoft to do any more work on the code base - simply open source it and allow the community to keep it alive."
In an essay at i-programmer.info, Gee shares a video of young Bill Gates building an app with Visual Basic in 1991, and complains that in the 25 years since Microsoft has open sourced .NET Core and the .NET Compiler Platform Roslyn, "but it has explicitly refused to open source VB6." She notes that Friday Visual Basic's program manager announced a "Visual Basic Silver Anniversary Celebratiathon," promising he's reaching out to the VB team members from the last 25 years for a behind-the-scenes retrospective, and adding "this is a party, so feel free to be interactive."
"What the post glosses over is that this history was blighted by the fork in the road that was .NET and that many Visual Basic fans are highly unsatisfied that the programming environment they cherished is lost to them..." writes Gee. "Vote for the proposal not because you want to use VB6 or that you think it is worth having -- Vote for it because a company like Microsoft should not take a language away from its users."
In an essay at i-programmer.info, Gee shares a video of young Bill Gates building an app with Visual Basic in 1991, and complains that in the 25 years since Microsoft has open sourced .NET Core and the .NET Compiler Platform Roslyn, "but it has explicitly refused to open source VB6." She notes that Friday Visual Basic's program manager announced a "Visual Basic Silver Anniversary Celebratiathon," promising he's reaching out to the VB team members from the last 25 years for a behind-the-scenes retrospective, and adding "this is a party, so feel free to be interactive."
"What the post glosses over is that this history was blighted by the fork in the road that was .NET and that many Visual Basic fans are highly unsatisfied that the programming environment they cherished is lost to them..." writes Gee. "Vote for the proposal not because you want to use VB6 or that you think it is worth having -- Vote for it because a company like Microsoft should not take a language away from its users."
Most /.'ers on here will spout off at how bad visual basic is/was. They'll lean on their programmer armchairs and say it was a horrible language let it die.
But in reality most of these /.'er probably haven't touched code in their life. VB targets someone who wants to make a graphical Windows program without much fuss. Sure, some people can spend 3 years of their life learning C/C++ then another year or two learning a Graphical API to produce a Windows program. (Or pay someone $100k a year to do it.) Or they can learn python in a year and a python API in another 6 months. (Or pay someone $75k/year to do it.) But for many programs this is overkill. That's why Basic exists, this is why VB, Gambius, QTBasic, beOS-Basic and many more existed. Sometimes you don't need a scalpel to do the job of a hammer.
Was VB6 over used? Yes. The real issue with VB stemmed from the corporate environment. The problem was two fold, firstly you never got fired for using Microsoft, and secondly, VB programmers were much cheaper than C/C++/Java etc. There are many complex programs out there in VB that should have been done in a lower language. Specially in the business world. But that does not make VB bad. VB is quite useful for 'basic' programs. .Net failed to understand this. I believe Microsoft saw how many complex VB applications existed in the business world. So they made .net more complex than it needed to be. In doing so it lost its point.
All of this said, I believe Microsoft should FOSS VB6. But I also believe that if the VB community wants VB, they need to make their own VB. A free, cross-platform, basic with a visual editor using QT or wxwidgets would be far more useful for many over the long haul than trying to revive a dead language for an extremely slowly dying OS.
(Disclaimer, I used VB5 in high school school to write IRC clients and Trojans before moving on to C++ for the last 20 years or so. ;) )
Not necessarily.
Most Mainframe programs from the late 1960's work with little or no changes. You can complain about COBOL and JCL, but at least a mainframe shop doesn't have to rewrite programs from scratch every 15 years or so for every new programming or UI fad style that comes along.
Maybe it cost more up-front to use the clunky mainframe languages, but if you factor in the cost of rewriting every 15 years to keep up with the Joneses, then the mainframe approach perhaps is cheaper over the long run. And more reliable.
Table-ized A.I.
Delphi can do everything VB6 can, but much better.
"It's such a fine line between stupid and clever" -- David St. Hubbins, Spinal Tap