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Comment by mysterydip | Hacker News Reader

Definitely. I was a huge fan of VB6, spent thousands of hours writing all kinds of things. When I first heard of VB.NET, I was excited to see what new features were implemented, expecting something like VB4->VB5->VB6. Boy was I in for a surprise. It seemed more like C wrapped in VB syntax. I started looking to other languages at that point, but as some other posters said I never found anything quite able to match the rapid prototyping GUI and debugging features of the VB6 IDE.

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I never did VB6 or VB.Net, but I've done VBscript with classic ASP and VBA in Excel. Glad I went with C# instead of VB.Net.

Not trashing VB, but C# was always more capable and fully featured than VB (VB couldnt even do unsigned integers, and I dont it can even now), and almost immediately more widely adopted in even .Net 1.0. Hell, C++ with COM was more capable (if not extremely annoying amd error prone). Of course VBscript and VBA share very similar syntaxes, but they're not the same languages or std object models/libraries, just maybe 95% similar.

Thing is, it was never about language capability. VB6 with COM was still faster in terms of development cycles for people used to the woes back then. Though I'd argue that the few differences there were between VBScript/VBA and VB6 made it much more capable from a development perspective back then... Most of my VB6 bubble moved to VB.Net during the transition, the widespread move to C# with those folks came years later when it became somewhat inevitable. After all, for the typical type of application, language is honestly mostly irrelevant as long as it does not get in your way.

All this feels a little like history repeating itself. We even naively made up a petition back then to keep VB6 around, somewhat glad that led nowhere in retrospect. A few decades ago I loved that the VB ecosystem was approachable and combined beginners and professional users. I somewhat think we have enough other good tools that fit this description these days, some of which incidentally even come with a good programming language.

Java still doesn't do unsigned

In terms of data structures, absolutely. Thing is, for a lot of applications you don't need all those extra features. Lots of apps are boiled down to "The user inputs this, I do some crunching, they get this output." Whether your ints are signed or not doesn't matter because you're only counting from 1 to 100 anyway. One thing it did do very well was to make string manipulation and conversion simple.

Apparently VB does support unsigned data types in some version: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/visual-basic/program...

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