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There are legions of VB programmers out there, you just don't hear from them. The ones I worked with a decade ago were not the types to wind up on HN, to read programming blogs, or to engage with the wider programming community. They were only really interested in programming to the extent that they used it to do a job (they were "Morts" [1]).

Mind you I don't think there's anything wrong with that as an attitude. Anyway, Microsoft puts resources into it because they probably have zillions of paying customers using it.

[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20080218051638/http://www.nikhil...




I am still a Classic Visual BASIC (VB 6.0) programmer.

Microsoft made it so VB 6.0 needed the Microsoft Java Runtime to install and it works with Windows 95 to XP, but in Vista and above it has problems installing. There are ways you can trick it to install but in the long run it is not worth it as it causes OS instability.

I got an XP Pro Virtual Machine in Virtualbox that I develop VB 6.0 apps inside of. GIT only works with XP and up, so Windows 2000 and under are out of the question. (Something about IPV6 support in the Git app and the first Windows to support that was XP so it fails in earlier Windows) So if you want to do legacy Windows programming and use Git, XP is your best choice. Visual Sourcesafe never seemed to work properly and I always had coworkers and management get in and scramble the files by accessing them directly on the NT Server or whatever and load them in MS-Word or MS-Frontpage that changed the formatting and then they saved bypassing source control. At least in Visual Sourcesafe 6 this was true, and I believe that Git is much better.

Since 1983 I have learned over 37 different programming languages on many different platforms. I only did Visual BASIC programming from 1995-2002 because in my area the IT shops were Microsoft shops and management decided to use Visual BASIC. While I knew Non-Microsoft languages, management never wanted me to use them.

I ended up on disability in 2003, and by that time Visual BASIC evolved into VB.Net influenced by Java and took a turn for the worse. Then Visual C# got used because it is more like Java than VB.Net is, and the high schools and colleges teach C# and Java so these new programmers learn it.

In high school I learned Pascal, in college I learned Pre-ANSI C, COBOL, FORTRAN, Ada, X86 Assembly, and others.\

Around 1995 I was learning Java and JavaScript. Then later Python and a few others. But on my spare time at home, because my managers didn't want me to use them.

I just recently took a Ruby on Rails MOOC and passed it with 100% on each programming assignment. I used to do VBScript ASP 3.0 programming. ASP.Net changed all of that apparently.

So yes I am one of the legions of VB programmers out there, got forced into disability, too old to work in my 40s (They only want young people), and read Hacker News because my interests are scattered all over the place in learning stuff.

The die hard Visual BASIC only programmers were the ones I had a coworkers who I had to hand-hold and teach Visual BASIC to them. Most earned university degrees but had no idea how to program. They secret handshaked their way to a job, while I had to pass tests and show code. I super debugged their code, and their code was sloppy and crashed systems and servers. They moved on without me into the Dotnet era and Visual C# and stick to Microsoft websites for their news using Bing as a search engine. They find me on social networks and ask me to apply for my old job so I could help them, but I cannot go back, I can only go forward. Work on my side-projects and do it as a hobby until I can get off disability one day.




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