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Comment by clarge1120 | Hacker News Reader

The redpill in me says MSFT created dotnet to kill VB6. That tool made it too easy (and cheap) to create value through automation.

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it's a generalized trend. Python is the new BASIC, but Python is SO much more complicated than BASIC. Web development was easy, now it's impossibly complicated, etc etc...

Rebol, Red, tcl/tk are good and easy programming languages, but kinda niche and obscure. I have no idea why computing is getting more complicated instead of easier.

I only disagree on web development. It was never easy. The web always always a mess, and nothing really worked. Today it's a mess, but you can make it work if you know what you are doing.

But yes, looks like the web was a trendsetter that pushed things into becoming harder without any good reason. Or maybe the web was just following the trend of the toolmakers all going out business at the early 00's (thanks a lot to Microsoft).

I miss the days when JQuery was the only JS library a person needed to know to do professional web dev. I stuck with web dev through the peak of Struts, but the constant changing of frameworks with (imo) minimal benefit to user experience pushed me to things besides web dev.

Ironically - given the article we're commenting on - a lot of the early problems with the web were solved, and I hesitate to say it, solved well by Flash. Its insecurity is what really pushed us away from it (well, and that it was a closed sourced Adobe project)

A lot of large companies did a tremendous amount of back office using VB6 applications. I remember visiting Disney and seeing it all over the place in the late 90s.

To be fair, WinForms is the spiritual successor to VB6, a lot more powerful, and just as productive.

There was nothing particularly easier about VB6 compared to the later VB.NET. VB (5/6) was, effectively, a scripting language designed around the COM object model. .NET originally started its life as "COM 2.0", with VB support consistently a part of the plan, and gradual feature creep turning it into what it became eventually.

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