Comment by Kwpolska
2 years ago
VB6 is a terrible, quirky programming language, and it’s a pain to debug, especially if you’re used to modern development tools.
Microsoft killed it to push .NET (although originally, VB.NET was promoted as the main GUI language). People went to .NET, but also chose the "adult" language of C# along the way. Also, WinForms isn’t deprecated (it was in maintenance mode for some time, but now it gets some new features).
Language history aside, browser-based UIs are easier to develop and deliver, so they won over desktop applications.
> browser-based UIs are easier to develop and deliver
Compared to the ease of a VB6 winforms app, they are way harder to develop. It's just the delivery that's a little easier - as well as the portability to non-Windows platforms like phones.
Writing a simple VB6 app is easier than a simple React app, sure. But things get complicated when something needs to happen in the background — you need threading, and all the issues that come with threads in most GUI frameworks.
One of the "quirks" that really caught me out once was the fact that VB6 doesn't do short-circuit evaluation of logical operators....
VB.NET was apparently suppose to get short-circuited evaluation, but many of the old VB6 developers hated that or misused it in a bunch of places and their code would break when they attempted to move over to VB.NET. So instead Or and And went back to not being short circuited, and we instead got OrElse and AndAlso, both of which are short circuited.