Visual Basic Turns 25
Despite much of the hate VB has gotten over the years, it served an insanely important purpose in the rise of internal business software. When I was at MSFT, me and the PM who owned the compilers for VB.NET and C# did a usergroup tour through Florida and I was amazed at how much of their world still runs on VB6 applications. Something like 1/3 of insurance software still does. It was one of the biggest reasons that Microsoft had to keep extending support for XP.<p>The transition from VB6 to VB.NET was a really sad one as it lost a lot of people - .net is a lot more difficult than 6 was. The result is that an entire group of people simply stopped making software and now we have businesses running on applications that are more than 20 years old that some random person in the company threw together over a week. There's a huge gulf between building a VB6 app and throwing together a web app today and despite much of the progress that has been made, we've taken some big steps back in terms of accessibility.<p>The difference between VB.NET and C# is pretty superficial, but I sincerely hope that someday people can experience the magic that something like VB6 offered. A lot of people got their start in programming thanks to it (myself included) and it's sad that it fell by the wayside to make way for "real programming."