Campaign to save Visual Basic 6 gathers support (Rapid obsolescence...of workforce?)

InfoWorld ^ | March 10, 2005 | Paul Krill

[baseball_fan]

An online petition gathering signatures to save Microsoft’s Visual Basic 6 programming language will not change the company’s intention to cut free support on March 31, a Microsoft representative said on Thursday afternoon.

Microsoft’s plan to stop support has been discussed for almost three years and the deadline already has been extended once, said the press representative, who requested anonymity. Visual Basic 6 has been supported longer than any other Microsoft product, according to the representative. “Extended” support, which is fee-based, will continue through 2008.

The vendor has spent the past few years encouraging Visual Basic 6 programmers to migrate to the new Visual Basic .Net platform, which has had its share of complications. The Microsoft representative acknowledged that the company “dramatically altered the Visual Basic language-syntax in Visual Basic .Net.”

As of Thursday afternoon, 1,009 signatures had been added to the petition, at http://classicvb.org/Petition/. One signatory interviewed stressed the difficulties in moving to Visual Basic .Net.

“It’s a different language,” said Visual Basic programmer Don Bradner, who has been part of Microsoft’s Most Valuable Programmer community. “It’s like me telling you that you have to write InfoWorld in French.” …

The petition asks that Microsoft further develop Visual Basic 6 and Visual Basic for Applications, continue supporting the language, and allow customers to decide when to migrate code to Visual Basic .Net. An updated version of Visual Basic 6 is requested by the petitioners…

“Microsoft should demonstrate a commitment to the core Visual Basic language. This core should be enhanced and extended, and changes should follow a documented deprecation process,” the petition states.

But all future versions of Visual Basic will be based on Visual Basic .Net…The company has provided “a wide range of resources to help Visual Basic developers make the transition…

[baseball_fan]

agree; instead of being customer and developer-centric, they are coming across as vendor-centric and risk alienating these two constituencies. if .net were both technically superior and better suited to their overall business environment, they will migrate of their own accord - unless one is able to "dictate" the situation.

I found these following statistics:

Microsoft introduced VB .Net in 2000, and since then, developer use of VB6 and older versions has declined steadily. Many of those leaving the language behind are migrating not to VB .Net but to non-Microsoft languages such as Java, according to some surveys. For example, a November 2004 survey of EMEA developers by Evans Data found that Visual Basic had lost 25 percent of its EMEA developer base since 2003.

VB .Net grew from 16 percent of EMEA developers in the autumn of 2002 to 32 percent in late 2004, with 43 percent of EMEA developers using some form of Visual Basic, the survey found. About half of the developers who had used VB6 or earlier did not migrate to VB .Net Evans Data said.

In North America most Visual Basic developers continued to use VB6 and older versions — 45 percent of all North American developers, compared with 34 percent for Visual Basic .NET. Fifty-four percent of North American developers used some sort of Visual Basic.

"One of the main issues keeping VB6 and earlier developers from making the migration to VB.Net is the steepness of the learning curve," said Albion Butters, Evans Data¹s international analyst, in a statement. "The difficulty in moving existing VB6 apps to VB .NET is, in some cases, insurmountable.²

[Tribune7]

THE ONE THING people point to as Microsoft's advantage is that they rigorously encouraged backward compatibility.

LOL. Try restoring files from a Win 95/98 backup on XP.

[general_re]

I can't believe that some big orgs aren't bumping into Excel limits or unreliability.

I'm sure it happens, but the one case I've personally observed where someone was really fighting Excel's limits was with a guy who was trying to do some serious statistical analysis on a rather large data set. Basically, the kind of thing you're better off doing in SPSS to begin with, but he was trying to do it on the cheap.

[Tax Government]

I want to put 5 years of NYSE and NASDAQ closing prices into Excel. Then, I want to make macros and some derived time series. Excel will break, I think.

[Dinsdale]

FYI MSDOS is inside every POS (thats Point of Sale, the POSs are the burgers) system in McDonalds.

The average life of a software product is significantly greater then three years. I've deployed code that will be running in VB 6 in ten years, maybe longer though that kinda scares me. No support required from MS however so I don't see what the big issue is. I bet some has still got Dataflex code deployed and running (phtttttt).

Should we reinvent systems that are doing the job and debugged because .NET works well? VB still works fine with or without MS.

[Dinsdale]

We still have some Microsoft Fortran programs running under DOS.

Microsoft Fortran? You got that to work? What era, they tryed twice and failed both times.

DEC Fortran under dev studio was sweet though.

[Tax Government]

Thanks for the suggestion of SPSS.

[general_re]

5 years of closing prices for a single stock is 1200 days or so, so the raw numbers won't be a problem in and of themselves, I imagine - it'll surely depend on how complex your analysis is.

[general_re]

SPSS or Statistica are both pretty good, albeit pricey when compared to Excel - you get what you pay for, though ;)

[Lancey Howard]

Hmmph. It's been a long time since I carefully rubber-banded my pile of punch cards after coding in Basic or COBOL or PL1 or whatever it was 25+ years ago....

[sevry]

Why not circulate a petition to require COBOL and FORTRAN to be around

Ummm . . . they are. Just not like they were.

[sevry]

SPSS

Good point. How long have SAS and SPSS been around?

[sevry]

Microsoft's secret weapon agains competitors has been its symbiosis with a support class of computer professionals (MCSE, MCP, MCSD, etc.), who acted as an unpaid salesforce and kept their employers safely within the MS product suite.

Doesn't sound like such a secret. Does that also explain Microsoft's reluctance to publicly document its products, in any sufficient level of detail? These people, instead, pay for training and seminars that contain 'secret' documentation, tools, and the like? And abuse of the free market guarantees them work?

Fascinating that Microsoft would so often entertain free market arguments, but essentially have set up a pseudo-guild system with themselves as the company store.

Very interesting.

[MarkL]

We still have some Microsoft Fortran programs running under DOS. And how many years has it been that that one hasn't been supported? Yes, a lot of times it is worth rewriting stuff in abandonned languages into the new stuff, but I never believe in doing it just for the sake of being able to say your whole inventory is "supported."

I think that I still have an open case with Microsoft on a problem I was having with their Fortran compiler back in 1986 (I think). Never did get it resolved. I take it things haven't improved much since then.

Mark

[MarkL]

No, but I played around with APL. It never took off because to program in that language you had to have a special keyboard! LOL.

Yeah, but I think that the longest APL program I ever saw was 11 lines!

Mark

[MarkL]

The average life of a software product is significantly greater then three years. I've deployed code that will be running in VB 6 in ten years, maybe longer though that kinda scares me. No support required from MS however so I don't see what the big issue is.

Actually, one of my clients is using an app where the front end was written in Dataflex to talk to a BTrieve SQL server, running on Novell Netware. It's got the bTrieve and IPX apis built in, so their locked into their software, since the guy who wrote it is long gone, they never had the source code, and nobody knows anything about it. That's where the problem lies... When you run your business on applications that nobody understands or can maintain.

Mark

[Nick Danger]

I mean, if MS killed backwards compatibility going from VB 6 to VB 7 (ooops, VB.Net), then why wouldn't they kill it again going from VB.Net to VB 8?

It could happen, but that would surprise me. They know how much hassle this is. They knew it when they did it. There were probably big fights in the product management shop over leaving the VB-6'ers behind. Nobody ever wants to do that on purpose.

But there does come a time when the engineers tell you that in order to do the New Thing right, they have to break the Old Thing.

It's a very risky thing to do. Intel is finding that out with the Itanium. "Let's do 64-bits right. Unfortunately that means leaving x86 behind." That one will probably turn out to have been a mistake. AMD extended x86 to 64 bits, and they're cleaning up.

I'm not surprised by the stats in #61. That's the risk you always take when you do this. "If we're gonna re-train everybody anyway, let's look around and see what else is out there." So you lose some to the competition.

Microsoft probably had a pretty good handle on what the attrition rate would be, but they must have decided it was worth it to get where they want to go.

But they won't be doing it often. They know what .NET is going to look like five years from now. There's no need to break things again for a long time.

[MarkL]

Yep. I am not a youngster. I started with a PDP-11, did some BASIC, did RPG-II, did IBM 360/370 Assembler, did some COBOL, did some Visual BASIC, then into C, and C++. From minis, to mainframe, to Windows PC, and now to Linux grid computing.

Nah-Nah-Nah-ne-boo-boo! Ha! PDP-4! With 64KB RAM! 5MB Winchester drive, and booted from tape!

I also worked with 360 system Assember, on IBM minis running 360OS (remember the "green card?" The only JCL command I can remember is balr). From there, I went to FORTRAN, then on to C, and left the programming side in about 1989. I've been doing PC system installation, repair, and networking ever since. I became a Novell instructor for 4 1/2 years, and I'm a Master CNI (instructor, or was, until they retired the certification), and hold 4 different Master CNE certs. But I've got to forget about keeping that up, in order to get up to speed ASAP on Microsoft products. Because MS is selling, while Novell isn't, even though Novell's got some of the coolest stuff around.

Mark

[mikegi]

I never liked .net. I bought the VS.NET after it came out but didn't like the editor/interface changes so I went back to my nice and comfy MSVC++ 6. I write to the Windows APIs so all the extra goop in .net isn't for me. I thought MFC (aka More F&%$ing Code) was bad enough, .net is huge.

This whole "save vb" thing is kind of silly. By now, any bugs have workarounds so updates aren't really needed.

Isn't it what you do with a language that's important, anyway?

[Arkinsaw]

Nah-Nah-Nah-ne-boo-boo! Ha! PDP-4! With 64KB RAM! 5MB Winchester drive, and booted from tape!

Ah, but did you ever boot up from a PAPER TAPE drive? Ka-chunk, ka-chunk, ka-chunk.