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Comment by gus_massa | Hacker News Reader

Clasic VB, (aka VB6). Each year it is more difficult to install the IDE, but the runtime is still installed by default.

It is incredible easy to build a nice one screen application with not very a very complicated background logic. Normal people like a nice graphical interface with a few buttons, and with Classic VB you can create them very easily and iterate and customize the form.

My last big problem was that it doesn't have a build in sort function, so you can use a n^2 sort or write a good sorting function by hand :( . When the logic start to be not so easy, there begin to apear problems.

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I completely agree. VB6 was the thing that got me into Windows application programming.So easy to create good looking and functional programs. I ended up building several "real" applications, some commercial and some free, which I still maintain. It's a wonder that it still works as good as it does.

I cut my teeth writing VB programs for enterprises in the 90's.

I still think it's the most productive programming environment I've ever worked in, in terms of actually getting something built.

Since then, I've learned a lot more about programming, and I'm not sure I'd accept the compromises that VB makes any more.

VB6 gets a lot of stick but it’s easily the best environment for rapidly prototyping and development ever created.

Some of Borlands IDEs had the same power for prototyping by C++ and Delphi weren’t as great for rapid development (though I have nothing against those languages themselves).

The closest thing we have these days is Electron but I don’t think that even comes close to ease of development once you factor in the clusterfuck of a mess modern web development is.

I did one project in Delphi, and didn't get on with it too well, but I think I was hampered by my familiarity with VB.

Now, I think I'd be much more comfortable with the compromises that Delphi makes.

Have a look at Lazarus (https://www.lazarus-ide.org/), an open source clone of what Delphi used to be. Active development, can compile to single executables for Windows, Linux and Mac OS. And the language is way more powerful than Basic.

I would say Basic is/was liked for the same reason as JS; low barrier to entry, no predefined/enforced structure, no strong typing. Easy to just get going and see where you end up. Object Pascal is not that and so it will possibly not appeal to the same crowd although the similarities are obvious.

Visual Basic was actually strongly typed (unlike JavaScript).

What it did differently to Pascal was that it allowed for lazy / inferred typing along with some transparent type conversation in places where the intention was obvious. However in VB once a variable is defined a type (either when defined or when assigned a value - depending on how the variable was defined) you couldn’t change it. Eg you cannot overwrite an integer with a string

Weirdly, despite being branded a toy language, this meant VB actually had one of the more sophisticated type systems out of the languages of that era because you had the laziness of languages like JS and PHP but without having the === et al kludge that some loosely typed languages need.

Perl is another language that frequently gets mocked but it’s eq vs == solution for differentiating between strings and numeric types is genius and again solves the whole type comparison problem that JavaScript has.

Thanks for that enlightenment; underestimated vb there I guess. I did work in vb and vba, but very minimal and very long ago. Now that you mentioned the example of not being able to change a type once set, that seems to ring a bell. I did a lot of code in Delphi. (And also in Perl actually which I liked and P6 looks good to me: many interesting concepts.)

Where does VB infer types? If you don't specify types (which is usually enforced with "Option Explicit"), everything ends up with a Variant type, i.e. a union type that can contain a value of (almost) any actual type and will be implicitly converted on use.

Ahh yes, I’d forgotten about the variant type.

I loved “Option Explicit”. To the extent that it was almost always the first line I’d write for any new project, module and class.

I have a XP virtual machine I use for maintaining an old software wrote in VB6 (less and less often). With an old Visual Studio on it.

Problem solved :-)

What do you use it for? Just personal apps or professionally?

Why not just use VB.Net/Winforms?

Originally: Not a fast enough computer and IIRC the first form editor of VB.Net was not as smooth as the one of VB6. Also it was a language change, let's call it VB#.Net

Now: 50% laziness and 50% don't want to migrate a few big projects that only need a tweak per year. If it ain't broke, don't fix it.

I haven’t tried to install VB6, but you said yourself that it is getting harder every year to install the IDE. What happens when you can no longer install the IDE?

> What happens when you can no longer install the IDE?

I guess a virtual machine with Windows 2000 and with VB6 is still smaller than the modern programming environments.

Depending in what you need to do; when I last tried, for a legacy system, to run under Wine it was flawless. So by the time it becomes impossible to install I would say Wine will be advanced enough to run all you need. All Windows stuff I need these days works perfectly under Wine. I work a lot with software from almost a decade ago and that mostly just works. Maybe at that time (few years) Wine will run on Windows as well (it has been a long term roadmap feature) to offer just this compatibility layer for old software support without having to install a Windows xp virtualbox.

Microsoft made fundamental changes to the Visual Basic language in order to make it run on the CLR, to the point that it feels more like an alternative syntax for C# than the successor of VB6– the superficial similarity between 6 and .Net caused lots of false-friend problems during he transition and most projects would have been better served by being rewritten in C#.

What were the biggest benefits that people got from switching? Where does VB6 most show it’s age? No modern looking controls? Harder to use Unicode?

Being able to get a job and not being a “VB developer” for 15 years, the company lays you off, you look for another job and find that no one wants to hire “VB developers”.

Then post on HN and Reddit and scream “ageism is rampant on our industry”.

Disclaimer: I’m 45.

A lot of VB programming was connecting together 3rd-party COM components, which had to be written in C/C++. After the CLR came along, those vendors slowly stopped supporting VB6 with their new releases as they moved their codebases and workflow to the new system.

That was only true for early VB versions.

VB6 had full support for native AOT compilation and creation of OCXs in pure VB code.

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