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Comment by whatnotests | Hacker News Reader

IIRC Microsoft killed Visual Basic with the introduction of VB.Net back around 2000.

Why are they celebrating its birthday?

I honestly wished they would of somehow open sourced Visual Basic 6, it was quite interesting being able to create software rapidly and easily that couldn't be "decompiled" the way .NET / Java applications can be reversed back from bytecode. Unlike Delphi / Pascal which are a bit harder to just pick up and learn by comparison (try just giving a child Delphi, and then give them VB6 and see which one they could work quicker in). I think VB.NET had not much of a point with a language like C# around. Maybe they should of redone some parts of Visual Basic .NET to make it more adaptable by all programmers. Multi-line comments is one thing I wished it had.

There is Gambas, which while not a clone in the way FreeBASIC is of QuickBASIC, is at least intended to provide a similar experience. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gambas

At that time open source was "cancer" to Microsoft

To Microsoft, VB.NET is still Visual Basic. They didn't kill VB, they made a new version that was different. The VB.NET compiler version numbers even start from 7 as it was/is considered the successor.

Because it brings out the nostalgia for people. Also a way to signal how long you've been programming, or that you stared programming early on in life.

VBA is still shipping in Office 2016

Pressing ALT-F11 in Office 2016 is quite depressing. They haven't spent even a minute improving anything in 15 years. It's quite shocking for a functionality which is so critical to so many people and companies.

VBA is the reason Visual Basic will never die gracefully.

And microsoft is pushing for people to use javascript instead.

If you think that VBA code written by novice programmers looks bad, I think you should look at javascript written by novice programmers. A guy was trying to draw a line and decided to do it pixel by pixel by adding "div" of 1px by 1px to the DOM, and each pixel was added with a callback!

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