[DonHopkins]

For very good reason, by an overwhelming majority of developers. The fact that a few developers thought VB.NET was even worse than VB6 doesn't lessen VB6's dreadfulness, it just highlights VB.NET's dreadfulness.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Visual_Basic_(classic)

>The final release was version 6 in 1998. On April 8, 2008, Microsoft stopped supporting Visual Basic 6.0 IDE. The Microsoft Visual Basic team still maintains compatibility for Visual Basic 6.0 applications through its "It Just Works" program on supported Windows operating systems.

>In 2014, some software developers still preferred Visual Basic 6.0 over its successor, Visual Basic .NET. Visual Basic 6.0 was selected as the most dreaded programming language by respondents of Stack Overflow's annual developer survey in 2016, 2017, and 2018.

Stack Overflow Developer Survey 2016: Most Dreaded: Visual Basic: 79.5%

https://insights.stackoverflow.com/survey/2016#technology-mo...

Stack Overflow Developer Survey 2017: Most Dreaded: Visual Basic 6: 88.3%

https://insights.stackoverflow.com/survey/2017#most-loved-dr...

Stack Overflow Developer Survey 2018: Most Dreaded: Visual Basic 6: 89.9%

https://insights.stackoverflow.com/survey/2018#most-loved-dr...

[cm2187]

I think VB6’s bad reputation is that it is stuck in the 90s. I don’t know if any version of a language from that time would be popular now (let’s leave FORTRAN and COBOL aside).

I disagree that VB.net was dreadful. But it broke backward compatibility but I think for good reasons: arguments being byref by default in VB6, collections being inconsistently 0 based or 1 based, the SET keyword that wasn’t really serving any purpose and was inconsistently applied, having to provide parameters within brackets or between spaces depending on whether the return value is assigned to a variable or not, etc...

I have a lot of sympathy for the frustration of someone who has to maintain a huge code base when backward compatibility is broken, but I think the changes VB.net introduced were necessary.

[raducu]

Oh, the memories, I loved VB6.

I remember when my father had to use medicall services billing program supplies by a natinal health insurance company, and he had some problems with it.

Luckily, I was a student in Bucharest and I went to their headquarters to play middleman between my father and their "informatician".

This "informatician" was the sole architect, UX designer, developer, tester, release manager for this program -- VB6+ access.

I sort of helped him debug the code, he built me a special version and handed it to me on a CD.

The program was ok UX wise and blisteringly fast. Years later, they hired this corrupt company that built software for the State and produced a horrendous program, that took terrible and just the startup took 15 minutes (parsing hunonguous XML and inserting it line by line into a local sql database, as far as I remember reading the logs).

The contract ran into HUNDREDS or millions of euros. Granted, the scope of the program was a bit wider.

[tdeck]

At least VB.net kept my favorite legacy error handling strategy: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/visual-basic/languag...

[relaxing]

Plenty of people still write C99.

[nightski]

It's not the language itself, but the platform. VB6 was primarily used to write RAD GUI applications. The GUI elements VB6 provide are very outdated by today's standards.

[zz865]

I only wish there was a modern tool as simple as VB for crud application.

[jimmaswell]

What's wrong with VB.NET Winforms with the Visual Studio WYSIWYG? I still have yet to find a better GUI building experience (alternately the same thing in C#)

[giardini]

You can still buy PowerBuilder, which was always superior to VB6 for relational applications.