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Comment by layer8 | Hacker News Reader

Visual Basic was very successful, until Microsoft turned it into a mere alternative syntax for C# [0]. There is a parallel universe in which classic Visual Basic would have continued to thrive as a win32 glue language. (It still does to a minor extent in the form of VBA.)

[0] http://catb.org/jargon/html/V/Visual-Fred.html

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I agree. VB6 was actively executed by Microsoft. VB6 didn't have to die.

I'm still surprised to this day that nobody stepped into that vacuum and created a VB6 clone. There should have been a ton of money for doing so--I wonder what prevented it.

I still have clients who are struggling to upgrade millions of lines of VB6 code base into something more modern (generally Python). GUI construction sucks in every single language since VB6.

The nice part is that they are unanimous in not choosing a Microsoft language ever again.

I've done some porting of VB6 into C# with WinForms. It's actually a pretty direct mapping. I wrote a converter, and then spend a few minutes cleaning up the converted code per form. Took me a couple weeks to convert a 500KB program, which mostly involved going through and converting VB6-isms that failed to auto-convert into C#. I can't imagine trying to translate something like that into such a different language and UI environment as Python. Unfortunate that they'd reject such a thing just because C# came from Microsoft.

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