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Comment by gregjor | Hacker News Reader

VB didn't die. It got reborn as VB.NET. Still supported, still used.

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/visual-basic/gettin...

The classic VB you probably remember got end-of-lifed in 2008, but MS still supports classic VB apps.

I think that’s the sense in which it died in that if you were going to switch to .NET you would probably also switch to C#. The original VB had A GUI builder better than almost anything (even today!) but the UI builders in today’s visual studio support C# as well if not better than VB.

I once had a job offer from a big company that developed exclusively in VB.NET, after transitioning away from VB6. Both for desktop and web. So it's still out there.

And everything in that IDE was fast and super responsive. Today's IDE are more complex than ever and yet they lack in functionality that was present in VB6.0

Yes, but look how good the dark grey text blends into the black background. /s

You bring up a good point, which is that I remember most the GUI builder. Basic isn't really that great a language, all things considered. But being able to quickly design and deploy GUI apps with VB was better than anything I've encountered since.

There are things like WebFlow and FlutterFlow but those tools feel clunky by comparison.

Hmmm...I'm wondering if you have ever used Netbeans. There is a GUI builder for Java Swing. Top notch.

Netbeans java gui builder is the only builder I’ve seen come close to the vb gui builder. In fact I was a little disappointed moving from net beans to a “real Java ide” since their gui builders don’t exist or aren’t as good. But vb as a language is a lot better than Java for getting to a productive state for a novice.

The best IMO was in Delphi. Lazarus captures that spirit well today but is mostly unknown.

Netbeans GUI builder was more powerful than VB's in some ways but just made simple things complicated.

After they re-implemented the compiler in VB.NET and ported it to .NET 5, the language won't get any new features / has stopped development [0]. They basically deprecated it.

[0]: https://mspoweruser.com/microsoft-starts-deprecating-visual-...

Is VB.net the same as VB ? Or it is like C# compared to C ?

Well Basic evolved a lot. Comparing 80s Basic on whatever hardware you imagine (think goto + Line Numbers) to 90s Microsoft VisualBasic (think event Händlers for UIs) is a similar jump than VisualBasic to VisualBasic.NET (writing OO code).

VB.NET is the same but so much more evolved. Also the runtime below was switched (surely for the better).

However, like outlined in other comments: VB.NET is a OOP language which handles procedural/functional code as a subset while VB of the 90s was purely procedural.

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