Re:Programming Language Rankings: January 2019
by barking on Friday March 22, 2019 @06:26AM
(#19461113)
VB6 is still going strong. As answers to most vb6 questions are available on the web since forever, people rarely ask vb questions on stackoverflow.
If you look at vbforums.com you can still have 500+ people at any time viewing the "vb6 and earlier" forum. And that's just one of many vb forums.
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Re:Programming Language Rankings: January 2019
by blub on Friday March 22, 2019 @07:08AM
(#19461353)
We should define "going strong"?
MS basically killed it, in 200x when the VB.NET snafu happened. I assume 100% of the VB work is legacy at this point and since solid architecture or design principles were never this language's strong points, it can't be particularly exciting legacy work either.
It's basically a career and technological dead-end.
Re:Programming Language Rankings: January 2019
by polygotdomain on Friday March 22, 2019 @08:24AM
(#19461837)
You could say the same about COBOL. Just because it's "dead" doesn't mean that businesses don't have tens to hundreds of thousands to even millions of lines of code hanging around in these "dead" languages.
While it may not be exciting work, not every programmer is looking to do the latest and greatest thing that will appear at the top of HN. They make good money because the business knows paying someone well to maintain it is better that paying a team to rewrite it. That's why one of the issues with COBAL programmers is retiring and passing on, not leaving to go to a NodeJS shop.