No troll. What are the (legitimate) reasons people are still using VB6 ?

[FunkyDexter]

I tried to use a Canon to send a fax one time, but I think I did it wrong. The paper didn't go very far, and it ended up a bit burnt.

Now, your mistake there was in your choice of medium rather than tools. You needed to go with a more conventional medium like, say, stone or iron. That way the message travels much further and has a much greater impact upon receipt. Indeed, the right medium can result in your co-respondent requiring a medium.

The only problem I have with this argument is...

I think you missed my point there, probably because I didn't make it clearly enough. I wasn't trying to suggest that, because you can use binary, you should. Rather I was trying to dismiss the "What can you produce in X that I can't produce in Y" question. You see that asked wherever folks are arguing over whether one technology has supplanted another. Those arguing for the apparently supplanted tech will ask that question because it appears to show that there's nothing to be gained from the new tech but it's a smoke screen. New technologies rarely allow us to produce something new, they just allow us to produce the same things quicker/better/more reliably and that's where I felt the debate would be better focussed.

[dreammanor]

New technologies rarely allow us to produce something new, they just allow us to produce the same things quicker/better/more reliably and that's where I felt the debate would be better focussed.

Not every new technology is like this, especially when it comes to a new technology that is pieced together under a stupid decision.

For the same thing (such as desktop software development), is .NET quicker/better/more reliably than VB6? Obviously not.

[Shaggy Hiker]

For the same thing (such as desktop software development), is .NET quicker/better/more reliably than VB6? Obviously not.

Not obviously, but you shouldn't be expecting it, either. ASM can do EVERYTHING that can be done with any other language. However, almost nobody writes in that anymore, except maybe some driver writers. ASM doesn't even have loops. You have to do your own looping. C is just a bit above ASM, and you can drop into ASM particularly easily with C. What C offers you is constructs like loops, and better names for things. It frees you from some of the awkwardness in ASM without adding all that much overhead. It did add SOME overhead, though, and could be a pain (header files).

VB6 is one of several languages that were above C. They offered better organization, and hid some things (not so utterly dependent on pointers, for example, though you can still use them) that caused lots of bugs. This made writing better and easier. Of course, the most significant gain was the ability to build forms so very easily. You didn't have THAT in C, and things like MFC and OWL, while attempts to make Windows forms easier, just couldn't compete for ease of use.

That's how languages work. If it was only a question of, "what can I accomplish with this language" nobody would have ever left ASM, because it can do EVRYTHING, and if you are smart enough, no other language can do anything better. What every other language added was making it easier to do a specific thing, or a set of things. Fortran has its goal in its name. Lisp kind of does. R certainly does not, as far as I know. The name "R" doesn't say "use this for statistics" to me, yet it's gaining somewhat unreasonable levels of popularity in scientific communities (it's math...EVERY programming language can do that).

People pretty much know what the point of .NET was: Compete with the shining (and unrealized) goal of Java as it was thought to be in the late 90s. .NET didn't get there, probably due to a weakness in leadership (Bill G had an unrepeatable name for a project to allow writing native Linux apps in .NET). The language may get there yet, though. The goal is write once, run anywhere. If you look at the changes in .NET over the last few years, you can see that things are moving in that direction. It does have the potential to achieve that goal, it's just that a few hurdles have to be crossed. Those hurdles are not small, and may be insurmountable at the moment, but we shall see.

[dilettante]

There are reasons why Java tends to float to the top of all language popularity lists: it was (and is) successful. Perhaps not as successful as polls created with a heavy thumb on the scales might suggest, but popular enough nonetheless. More popular than .Net can hope to be.

We may even be in the "end times" for .Net right now. Only time will tell but as Microsoft continues to run away from Windows .Net could easily be another casualty.

Microsoft has insisted that Java is a "first class citizen" on Azure since at least 2010.

https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/develop/java/

There has probably never been a better time to move away from .Net even on Windows.


I can use hyperbole too.