As usual, the netties are totally in the ditch! Wrong assumptions, bad mathematics, pointless examples of others they know nothing about (you browsed it on google did you not?) and links that don't work. I am talking about real code that I write and that works, not google links or other half-baked graphics library from ... whatever. VB6 puts .net graphics to shame on every aspect, performance, capacity, speed, capabilites. Try a bilateral space domain bitmap filter in .net... (oopss no such thing)!
The programming world toppled over with VB6 : finally a top level language with limitless possibilities, so easy to use because of its free form and human like simple syntax, leaving you more time to concentrate on crucial aspects of the programming job at hand. There is a concept that netties just don't seem to get, and that is : PRODUCTIVITY.
A big share of the real world is about physics, mechanics and mathematics. I am much more interested in doing FFT's, convolution and correlation on mechanics problems than doing the programming. The language is just a tool to support other mathematical activities. Suddenly with VB6, scientific programming was 5% learning curve/maintenance and a full 95% productivity for problem that matters.
Last 15 years has been a joyride and many people just don't want out of the band-wagon just now...not ever in fact. Who in his right mind would give up 95% productivity in a painless programming environment where everything works so fine all the time and with an almost unlimited access to low level API's power? For what?
Face reality : .Net and the Framework are incredibly stuffy, cumbersome, low productivity, painful environnments born out of the symbiosis relationship between a bunch of micro-managing minded, OOP obsessed techies on a binge (techies are, by definition, people that like making things more complex than they really are) and a very ill advised managing class (pun) that let things go this way for too long, backing them.
The point you are not getting is that scientists and engineers have long masterered ALL the programming they really need, we like the 95% productivity of VB6 and we will just not settle for less or anything else for that matter.
It is pretty amazing to see a company spits out on its own creation, which ironically happens to be one of her best ever, and fail, in fifteen years, at making a successor product that competes with it.
A bunch of us, we are just watching from afar a company entangling herself in a web of doubtable OOP concepts and miscelaneous technologies, jumping from XML to AXML, Silverlight to LightSwitch, DAO to ADO, deprecating perfectly good working stuff at will along the way, for the benefit of their next new great idea that will work (or maybe not), due for deprecation anyway. And from a distance, it all looks pretty silly because it is mostly about stuff a scientific productivity programmer (or accountant or just about any other trade) does not want or even care about.
Fact is : circa 2000 had all the best programming tools (namely VB6) on an hardware base technology that remains unchallenged and is not to be for decades to come. If you want it in other words, that means that the low level kernels of Windows have achieved monolithic status for as long as there is a product called Windows. Then on the upper floor, the techies are having a ball, making Windows and .Net an ever harder thing to manage in the name of...how did you say? Something about managed.. and future ... hum there was also something about spaghetti but I lost you there, you were babbling and I have a short attention span for that sort of things...
I do appreciate that there is a whole sector of programming that is of little interest to me, and about which those fore mentionted programming technologies are promising wonders, and I have no problems with that. I say go for it, have a ball.
But in a sane, mature, productivity world, you don't fix things that are not broken, you do not throw away a winning recipe, you don't re-invent the wheel when yours is running so smoothly, you don't invent New Coke nor Windows 8 (or 10) nor .Net, and if you do, salvation only goes through bringing back Classic, or else drown yourself in your new taste nobody likes.
What the VBsixters are telling you is : we want a hammer and a nail, we'll take care of the rest.
Please bring back VB6! Nothing else will do really. Every year spent widens the gap. Run-time will last beyond 2024. Maybe at that time Xojo or similar will be ready to take over productivity programming and give us what we want. And when that time comes, it will probably not matter anymore whether it's written MS on the label or not.
A comment by MathScienceAndGraphics
Ipsis verbis
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