I read an insightful article by Ryan Lucas on the history and legacy of Visual Basic. This article links to another chuckle worthy article by David Platt—written way back in 2012—on why Visual Basic 6 still thrives. Excerpt below.
A student of mine named Eric once joked that Visual Basic 6 was “the un-killable cockroach” in the Windows ecosystem. That analogy goes deeper than you might think. Cockroaches are successful because they’re simple. They do what they need to do for their ecological niche and no more. Visual Basic 6 did what its creators intended for its market niche: enable very rapid development of limited programs by programmers of lesser experience. It was never meant for heavy-duty coders developing complex applications.
Visual Basic 6 accomplished its goals by abstracting away the complexity of the underlying Windows OS. Simple things were very simple to accomplish. On the other hand, complex things, such as dealing with threads, were impossible. My rule of thumb for Visual Basic 6 was: if I couldn’t do it within 10 minutes, I couldn’t do it at all.
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Almost all Visual Basic 6 programmers were content with what Visual Basic 6 did. They were happy to be bus drivers: to leave the office at 5 p.m. (or 4:30 p.m. on a really nice day) instead of working until midnight; to play with their families on weekends instead of trudging back to the office; to sleep with their spouses instead of pulling another coding all-nighter and eating cold pizza for breakfast. They didn’t lament the lack of operator overloading or polymorphism in Visual Basic 6, so they didn’t say much.
The voices that Microsoft heard, however, came from the 3 percent of Visual Basic 6 bus drivers who actively wished to become fighter pilots. These guys took the time to attend conferences, to post questions on CompuServe forums, to respond to articles. Not content to merely fantasize about shooting a Sidewinder missile up the tailpipe of the car that had just cut them off in traffic, they demanded that Microsoft install afterburners on their busses, along with missiles, countermeasures and a head-up display. And Microsoft did.
But giving Visual Basic .NET to the Visual Basic 6 community was like raising a coyote as a domestic dog, then releasing him into the woods, shouting, “Hunt for your dinner as God intended, you magnificent, wild creature!” Most of them said, “Heck with that. I’m staying on my nice warm cushion by the fire while you open me a can of Alpo.” And Visual Basic 6 kept right on going.
Ryan Lucas then goes on to argue that because Microsoft made it very difficult—if not impossible—to move from Visual Basic 6 to VB.NET, it ended up costing Microsoft the battle for web.
Microsoft had broken the trust of its army of Visual Basic developers. Faced with the options of either starting over from scratch in VB.NET or moving to new web-native languages like JavaScript and PHP, most developers chose the latter—a brutal unforced error by Microsoft. (It’s easy to forget the pole position that Microsoft had on the web in 2001: Internet Explorer had 96% market share, and Visual Basic apps could even be embedded into web pages via ActiveX controls.)
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