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…

[sevry]

a Win 95/98 backup on XP.

So XP won't run Win9x programs? That what you mean?

The free market point was that Microsoft seems to have forgotten how they got here, by providing backward compatibility, as was discussed in that thread you apparently missed. If it's true that .NET is inferior, and incapable of doing previous tasks as well, or as reliably, as the old MS tools, the visual programming languages, then you have to argue in favor of some protected market, to benefit Microsoft, or else throw Microsoft to the free market competition which might provide better tools and solutions, in the long run. We'll see.

Another aspect of Microsoft's success was monopolistic threat to clone vendors. That was the complaint behind the Justice Dept. suit which arguably sparked the dot.com bust under Clinton. That's not a free market practice. But what's forgotten is that Microsoft OS provides drivers and compatibility with various hardware, and certain extras. And this seems a problem for UNIX clones, right now. And the free market prefers Microsoft, and has for this reason since at least Win 3.1 (where the extras were TrueType fonts, which themselves are now 'deprecated' in favor of OpenType (a superior technology) running only XP/SP2)).

Microsoft can change whatever they want, however they will. But someone else suggested the great hypocrisy. They talk of a free market, but seem to have rigged it to favor a certain protected class based on their own lack of documentation for their own products. If so, if that's the case, what's free, what's competitive, about such a market?

They can't have it both ways. And the real free market will determine that, ultimately. You already see people wanting to dispense with IE for Firefox. You already see developers using some UNIX variant in preference to developing in the NT line of Microsoft OS. Again, we'll see.

[baseball_fan]

"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."

See what you think: Google Pioneers Use Old Microsoft Tools In New Web Programs (create Google Office?)

[pt17]

The only JCL command I can remember is balr

Wasn't BALR the "Branch And Link Register" 360/370 assembler command and not JCL?

[nmh]

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

Ah, some people learn from that.

A better use of ones time is to LEARN what is useful to an employer rather than trying to maintain the status quo for self preservation reasons. Or if people don't want to keep up with technology then perhaps it's time to try something else.

[nmh]

The ugly truth is this, if an employer wants you to learn something else and you don't want to then your other option is to do something else. The marriage is over. Call it irreconcilable differences. IT is no different than any other job. No one owes you a living and if you're not the CEO you don't get to call the ultimate shots.

[Tribune7]

So XP won't run Win9x programs? That what you mean?

Run the program? XP Backup won't even recognize the Win9X /ME files. There are workarounds but it is aggravating.

[general_re]

Oh, man, a while for both of them. SPSS started life on mainframes back in the early 70's, IIRC. Statistica came along a bit later, and was pretty much the first serious stats package for microcomputers - maybe mid-80's or so, I think.

[bvw]

Except if you are a running unix or unix-like.

Otherwise temporary widgets sold to entreprises like "Source-Safe" become yet more thick layers of rot to dig through for nuggets.

[bvw]

The old DOS accounting programs could still be run on XP, they say

Yeah, well the simple good old servicable accounting program will work, sure. But the more once-young, fancy and nubile accounting program developed for VB-3 or some early MFC doesn't, or rather if it and its long train of DLLs works at all, other things will not.

[HuntsvilleTxVeteran]

I think some of the people are b!tching because they don't want to pay more money for an updated program.
Not because they can not learn slightly new commands.

[bvw]

They want an update. VB.NET is not an update -- it's a half-breed. The real article is C# and .NET. VB.NET is neither VB nor as useful or potent as C#. And C# is a total mind-croak for many VB programmers.

[bvw]

BTW -- just the *update* from VB 5 to VB 6 currently runs about $700.

[free_european]

I can't imagine anyone serious uses Excel to work with big datasets, its not really capable at all. I work with what Id consider medium sized data arrays (maybe 50 variables and 10,000-20,000 observations). I use STATA but SAS is even better. SPSS isnt so hot as its windows based and if you want to do any stats you cant do anything too fancy.

[general_re]

I use STATA but SAS is even better. SPSS isnt so hot as its windows based and if you want to do any stats you cant do anything too fancy.

If you're working with Oracle DBs or you're a UNIX only shop, SAS would be the way to go, but for the other 95% of users, SPSS does virtually everything SAS does, along with having some notable advantages in some areas - I still haven't seen anything in SAS to match the curve-fitting in SPSS, although it's been a while since I looked, and Clementine is far superior to the the data mining capabilities of SAS, IMO. Not to say that it's across the board better, but I don't think it's nearly so clearcut as "SAS ruleZ - SPSS is teh sux0rz!" ;)

[general_re]

I use STATA but SAS is even better. SPSS isnt so hot as its windows based and if you want to do any stats you cant do anything too fancy.

If you're working with Oracle DBs or you're a UNIX only shop, SAS would be the way to go, but for the other 95% of users, SPSS does virtually everything SAS does, along with having some notable advantages in some areas - I still haven't seen anything in SAS to match the curve-fitting in SPSS, although it's been a while since I looked, and Clementine is far superior to the the data mining capabilities of SAS, IMO. Not to say that it's across the board better, but I don't think it's nearly so clearcut as "SAS ruleZ - SPSS is teh sux0rz!" ;)

[general_re]

Now why did that go through twice? Well, it probably was worth reading again ;)

[Southack]

"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."

I'm unconvinced. No one in the C++ world would tolerate a new C++ release that couldn't run old C++ code, yet that's what MicroSoft did with VB.Net to all previous versions of VB.

Frankly, the sort of child-like programming mentality that would frivolously cast aside backwards compatibility in the name of doing something the "right way" for the future is the same mindset that will repeat that behavior when the next new fad comes along.

For instance, MicroSoft is going to screw *either* their current MS Excel, MS Word, MS Access, and Autocad developers, or MicroSoft will screw current VB.Net developers, when MicroSoft makes its next VBA release for its major apps.

VBA is not currently compatible with the new VB.Net, so the next release of VBA must, by definition, screw either the old VBA developers or the new VB.Net developers.

So I already *know* that MicroSoft is going to screw a substantial number of its current developers again in the near future, the only question is whether MicroSoft will hammer their VBA or their VB.Net developers.

And that makes it difficult to persuade me that MicroSoft isn't going to repeat their VB 6 to VB.Net fiasco again in the future. Frankly, it's a fait accompli.

[ProudGOP]

The real article is C# and .NET. VB.NET is neither VB nor as useful or potent as C#.

What makes C# that much better than VB.Net? I know there are some small differences like operator overloading and no unsigned integer support but that doesn't seem like too big of a deal for most people.

[free_european]

I guess it depends what you use it for. Im an econometrician and when I used SPSS I found that its windows format was too restrictive. I like STATA since you can write code to have it do all the tricks you want it to. That said, I havent used SPSS in years, maybe its better now than I remember.

[Nick Danger]

Wasn't BALR the "Branch And Link Register" 360/370 assembler command and not JCL?

Yes.

BALR 14,15

was a common way to start a routine, to set up an index register for the rest of the addressing.

JCL was that crap that started out

 //JOB PARAM=VALUE...