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Comment by fjert | Hacker News Reader

I had a boss who started one of his companies in his attic and while he wasn't a 'real' software developer, he was still able to bring his initial ideas to fruition to get a working product because of how approachable VB is, especially for those without much experience programming. It definitely has its purpose and I am glad Microsoft understands that. The hate over VB and BASIC languages in general seems like a matter of elitism among software developers to me and oddly enough, I see this attitude from inexperienced developers more often than experienced ones.

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The hate on VB(6) is specific, and it's caused by the language making the "programmer" slip into bad practices, like mixing the application and presentation layers, or the infamous "On Error Resume Next".

Design-wise, this is well justified hate - I stress "design-wise".

In the bigger picture, the ease of the framework attracted plenty of unqualified masses, therefore there is surely lots of people with a painful past of VB6 applications maintenance.

Of course I don't want to detract from VB6, as at the same time, it made very simple (or as simple as possible) for almost anybody to create applications - I'm not aware of any other language/framework which accomplished this.

I have written small kid's experimentations in QBasic, and it was fun at the age of 13, but then when I had to use VBA at the age of 28 after considerable amount of experience in C# (among others), it was painful. Is this because of elitism? No, it is because VBA has some terrible properties, which are not true for VB.Net. VB.Net is mostly OK, I just don't use it.

I'm also glad they keep that product alive, because in addition to the many positive aspects meantioned in the comments it makes sure that the CLR evolution takes into consideration the aspects needed for a more broad variety of languages.

It's not that odd to me that inexperienced developers just don't "get it" yet about stuff like this. Maybe because I used to be (more) inexperienced and have opinions like this.

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