[MichaelGG]

I've personally watched an essentially-non-programmer take VB.NET, drag-n-drop, write some event handlers, and have a functioning little app. So while VB6's IDE is faster than the ".NET" Visual Studios, most of your other complaints are really not valid.

[UnoriginalGuy]

Yeah the complaint is ridiculous and this coming from someone who learnt on VB 6. VB 6's IDE cost $500+ at the time and even getting the education edition was a huge PITA (it was HEAVILY pirated by students).

VB.net and C# (and F#) are free [legal] downloads from the internet and both just as capable as VB6 was back in the day (the things Visual Studio Pro and above add aren't really relevant to beginners, except the testing framework perhaps).

Plus back in the day I found VB 6 quite limiting. For 101 level stuff it is plenty fine, but once you want to go beyond simple applications (e.g. games) you're left almost fighting the language and libraries itself.

With C# in particular, while it is certainly slower than Go/C/C++/D/etc, that's really the only major limitation. You can definitely access much more of Windows' API infrastructure, it supports unsafe code, the .Net framework is more comprehensive, and the language features are extremely modern (F# more so). There really is no limits except execution speed.

Honestly kids today are extremely lucky. I would have killed to be learning on C# back in my day. Fuck VB 6.

[raverbashing]

"Plus back in the day I found VB 6 quite limiting. "

This, exactly this.

The transition to .NET was a blessing, VB6 is really useless for anything else than "basic business apps" and even then!

IIRC you could only read/write a file (raw data) byte by byte (ok, that was before VB6, still...)

[MikeTV]

As a counterpoint, since doing anything advanced in VB6 (game-making-wise - that's what I learned it for) required low-level calls to GDI, OpenGL, or DirectX libraries, I feel I obtained a better picture of how the OS operates at that level than if I had started on C#. C#'s nicer, for sure, but if you're just doing it to learn how computers work anyway...

[Locke1689]

"With C# in particular, while it is certainly slower than Go"

Source? C# should be much faster than Go.