[moonchrome]

It's been unsupported for 12+ years ? If you have code relying on it and haven't migrated to something supported it means your code is not maintained (don't care what your excuse is, using VB6 in 2020 means you're not actively maintaining the project), written 2 decades ago with the coding standards of the era, the original developer team is gone and probably retired and since nobody is actively maintaining it nobody has much knowledge about how it works.

So yeah anything that's still running on VB6 is very likely crap.

[joshuaissac]

> If you have code relying on it and haven't migrated to something supported it means your code is not maintained

No, it does not. It means that Microsoft no longer provides support for the IDE. That does not prevent the developer from maintaining their own VB6 code. With some extra steps, the official IDE and compiler for VB6 can still be installed on Windows 10. Running programs built from VB6 is still supported.

> written 2 decades ago with the coding standards of the era, the original developer team is gone and probably retired

This applies regardless of the programming language to any codebase that has been around for long enough.

[moonchrome]

>No, it does not. It means that Microsoft no longer provides support for the IDE. That does not prevent the developer from maintaining their own VB6 code. With some extra steps, the official IDE and compiler for VB6 can still be installed on Windows 10. Running programs built from VB6 is still supported.

If you're comfortable with this then I don't think you're actively investing in your software.

>This applies regardless of the programming language to any codebase that has been around for long enough.

No, if you have a team actively maintaining the project you have the knowledge transfer in-house which is the second part of that sentence.

[joshuaissac]

> If you're comfortable with this then I don't think you're actively investing in your software.

What exactly does 'actively investing' mean in this context and why is it needed? If the software is actively maintained so that it continues to meet business requirements, is that not enough?

> No, if you have a team actively maintaining the project you have the knowledge transfer in-house which is the second part of that sentence.

That is orthogonal to what programming language is being used. When the project is actively maintained, knowledge can be transferred regardless of the programming language.

[moonchrome]

>What exactly does 'actively investing' mean in this context and why is it needed? If the software is actively maintained so that it continues to meet business requirements, is that not enough?

If you're actually investing in maintaining something that's running on a deprecated platform that's decade over EOL and nobody wants to touch with a 10 foot pole - that sounds like a crap project by definition.

Anything that's sufficiently funded to be actively developed would have figured out a migration plan by now, the only scenarios where it wouldn't sound like terrible projects to work on.

>That is orthogonal to what programming language is being used. When the project is actively maintained, knowledge can be transferred regardless of the programming language.

No it's not when the language is deprecated by the owners for over 12 years at this point. It's like having software that only works on windows xp and maintaining it because you can still boot a VM to run it. Good luck working on that POS.

[joshuaissac]

> If you're actually investing in maintaining something that's running on a deprecated platform that's decade over EOL and nobody wants to touch with a 10 foot pole - that sounds like a crap project by definition.

The platform it runs on is Windows 10, which is not deprecated. Microsoft provides an 'It Just Works' guarantee on Windows 10 for VB6 applications. It does not matter whether someone wants to maintain code. The company pays people to do it. Just like how there are many people who do not want to work on proprietary software but do it anyway because their employer pays them to do it.

> Anything that's sufficiently funded to be actively developed would have figured out a migration plan by now, the only scenarios where it wouldn't sound like terrible projects to work on.

Actively developed means that bugs are fixed and features are added as needed by the business. It does not mean jumping on the latest tech trends when there is no business justification. And I am pretty sure that the users are happy that they can use a fast, responsive application instead of a lumbering, bloated Electron app.

> No it's not when the language is deprecated by the owners for over 12 years at this point. It's like having software that only works on windows xp and maintaining it because you can still boot a VM to run it. Good luck working on that POS.

That is a strawman argument because the VB6 IDE and programs compiled with it run on Windows 10 natively, without a VM. And running VB6 programs on Windows 10 is officially supported.

[moonchrome]

>The platform it runs on is Windows 10, which is not deprecated. Microsoft provides an 'It Just Works' guarantee on Windows 10 for VB6 applications. It does not matter whether someone wants to maintain code. The company pays people to do it. Just like how there are many people who do not want to work on proprietary software but do it anyway because their employer pays them to do it.

My point is that every time I've seen scenarios like this with products stuck on unsupported platforms is that product is used but there's no money in actively maintaining it (or else it would have made migration plans in the last 12 years). This means you are likely getting shit money working on it, working on a legacy stack you won't use anywhere else, codebase is almost always shit, and the work you do is unrewarding. So crap projects by definition, and every testimonial I've seen so far confirms it.

I've worked on projects being stuck on tech close to EOL - they always had migration plans to upgrade to supported tech.

[hughrr]

That’s kind of life though.

We have a COM component written in VB6 running in IIS on windows containers on Amazon in EKS.

It works but it’s crap!

[ninjanomnom]

At my last job there was a team of 4 or so people who had originally written some vb6 code that they were still maintaining. This was as recent as 2020 and since there were no plans to stop I assume it's still ongoing with, at best, some plans to move off being made what with how slow things moved.

Even they agreed it was shit though.

[pbhjpbhj]

Welp, what if I told you a Sixth Form (Y12, age 16-17) in a UK school has a computing course that just started and is reportedly using VB6 ... I'm really not sure what to say?

[bryanrasmussen]

yeah it wasn't said when it was moved from though? The reference to Machine learning implies more modern, but not necessarily so.

At any rate even when it was maintained still looked down on, I guess a Dijkstra based side-effect.

[wdb]

There is RO Mercury?