If Microsoft are really going to change their ways they need to stop ignoring the Visual Basic 6 (VB6) community.
According to the Tiobe index, May 2014, Visual Basic (VB6) is the 5th most popular programming language in the world. This is an amazing fact given that Microsoft stopped active development over 16 years ago! The huge VB6 community that has built much of the worlds mission critical applications feel left behind. This is because Microsoft refuse to update this language, attempting to force the developers to move to incompatible new software development tools (like .Net).
Microsoft's .Net by most of this community is not seen as a superior alternative. According to uservoice.com, most VB6 developers simply want a 64-bit version of VB6 to continue their market dominance into the next 16 years. Thus so far Microsoft has not only failed to act but failed to make public any posts concerning this phenomena.
Other data points show VB6 is not just of aging programmers but is also being picked up by new generation after new generation of developers.
According to Linus Torvalds, inventor of Linux, "I personally believe that Visual Basic (vb6) did more for programming than Object-Oriented Languages did."
How long will Microsoft neglect the most dedicated software community the world has ever known?!
Indeed, VB6 is the most rapid RAD out there by a long shot. Microsoft (MS) have lost all sense of consistency, led by the nose by a new class of snobbish, bloatware loving, fascist ("do as we say") "programmers" of the ilk that global corporations love (most India based now), who simply don't want to see individuals and small companies intuitively making reliable, profitable programs overnight. MS successfully crushed my small business product stream with this campaign losing me millions. So I have had to change (I still use VB6 for RAD) and now I use Python (a cross between C and basic). And guess what? That means I am no longer tethered to MS treachery. Win win for me. Do MS care? No, their bigotry is so ingrained, they continue their mad lemming march towards falling sales. The corporate consultants to whom I report no longer care whether it is 32b, 64b, VB6, VB.net, C#... they know practicality has been "cast asunder" my MS belligerents -- they know, because they scratch their heads in disbelief as they are expected to provide system operators and data entry clerks with software that looks more at home on the Xbox or a mobile phone... Windows 8. I predict in 10 years time there will be a new OS giant (perhaps Andriod, but they also fail consistency) and MS will be another struggling corporate systems supplier alongside IBM. A VB6 replacement is much needed. Perhaps when a decent IDE comes to Python, that is it. Oh but what am I talking about? A genuine VB6 upgrade would have me going back to MS overnight..
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