Introducing Mercury: A Visual Basic Language That Keeps Getting Better | Hacker News Reader

Introducing Mercury: A Visual Basic Language That Keeps Getting Better

blogs.remobjects.com

17 pointswdb12 comments

Hmm - at first, I thought it was this:

Seems like a google search might have been good before picking an name ?

I didn't know about this one. Frankly this looks a lot more than interesting than VB revival.

I already brought this up with them, they knew about it but decided that it "doesn't have enough usage so we aren't worried about people getting our product confused with it".

that's actually a pretty lame response. They're both programming languages - I'm sure there will be no confusion :-P

Interesting thing about Mercury is that Prince [1] is written in it which is the only "browser" that supports the full print CSS spec and is widely used and considered the gold standard for converting HTML to PDF. Mercury was developed by the founders of Prince.

So you probably have used content created in Prince which is built with Mercury. Pretty interesting to have such a successful product built with your own programming language that is also as complex as a web browser [2].

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prince_(software)

2. https://www.princexml.com

A modern Visual Basic that generates native code, great!

$50/month... suddenly out of my price range again. 8(

does anyone know why VB developers seem to hang on to VB with such tenacity? I know two people who still use VB6 for their own stuff, and I work with dozens of people who write and maintain VB.net software every weekday. they have no plans to leave VB.net.

this puzzles me. I consider it a bad thing to be glued to any particular language that strongly. at some point, intentionally ignoring other languages is detrimental to growth as a developer, to me.

I dunno, maybe not. I can say that the love that people have for VB goes directly against my own experiences with VB. I found it very painful, and now avoid it at any cost.

I only write code a few months a year when needed. The pain of learning VB6 doing AOL "Progs" back in 1998, still benefits me to this day.

For me, habit mostly.

In the .NET eco-system I can do C#, but I have to think about it, and hit Google more than I'd like. VB.NET I am 100% fluent in, and for my own personal utilities (I am not a for-hire programmer) it's completely adequate. Porting stuff to Linux is a bit of a no-no though without using Mono.

I would never actively write anything in VB6 though unless I was targeting an old 16 bit Windows platform. VB6 and VB.NET (2017) are miles apart as languages.

I am not oblivious to the situation, and I do know that at some point I'll have to make the effort to switch to C# as my 1st choice.

I also don't get why I have to end my code lines with semi-colons, when there are perfectly good CRLFs directly after?

does anyone know why VB developers seem to hang on to VB with such tenacity?

Because it is a much easier to use tool, far better suited to the beginner.

It's the same reason I cling to Lazarus/Pascal... you can do far more work in far less time.

Oh, and everything is actually documented with working examples, unlike the modern trend of "docs" that encourage you to figure it out for yourself.

that's not a trend, that's just crappy documentation.

that's always been really common.

Not even closely up to Mercury, sorry.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com