IS BASIC programming still in vogue?
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Hi Pros!
I was once attending classes on the above. Please is the language still in vogue?
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BASIC went out of vogue around 1999. Today it is a mark of shame - only used to support legacy systems or by teams who never updates their skills.
True BASIC went out of vogue in the late 1980s. But VB revived it a little in the 1990s for low end desktop app development. It was never a good server side language and never popular outside of desktop Windows apps and the Small business market since it never ran on serious servers.
Today it might be the absolute last non-hobby language that I would recommend. There is always a better option than VB. It has no sweet spot, not even in labs, research or education.
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Even in the ASP era, Jscript was the more serious choice than VBScript. So VB was already waning around 1998.
Once .NET arrived it came with C# and that was the final nail in the coffin of VB being taken seriously. That it is even still supported today is a wonder.
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What kind of programming are you looking to do?
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@scottalanmiller said:
Even in the ASP era, Jscript was the more serious choice than VBScript. So VB was already waning around 1998.
Once .NET arrived it came with C# and that was the final nail in the coffin of VB being taken seriously. That it is even still supported today is a wonder.
Only in your utopia. There is a huge embedded base of applications created and maintained and still being developed today in VB.
I won't argue there are better languages out there. That does not negate reality.
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@JaredBusch said:
@scottalanmiller said:
Even in the ASP era, Jscript was the more serious choice than VBScript. So VB was already waning around 1998.
Once .NET arrived it came with C# and that was the final nail in the coffin of VB being taken seriously. That it is even still supported today is a wonder.
Only in your utopia. There is a huge embedded base of applications created and maintained and still being developed today in VB.
I won't argue there are better languages out there. That does not negate reality.
Are you conflating "in use" with "in vogue?" Basic is anything but in vogue. It is, and has been, quite the opposite. But many very bad and/or very not in vogue languages like COBOL and Fortran linger. But no one calls them in vogue.
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What the IT world sees of software tends to be very different from what developers see too. VB lingered in the SMB IT space as acceptable long after it was embarrassing for developers to use it.
One could argue that IT programming itself is not in vogue in development circles
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It's clearly not in vogue. But calling it "a mark of shame" and "embarrassing for developers" is OTT.
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@Carnival-Boy said:
It's clearly not in vogue. But calling it "a mark of shame" and "embarrassing for developers" is OTT.
Is it? Programming in VB is definitely considered embarrassing in many programming circles because of its heritage and use cases. Using VB today generally means that you've not kept up - whether out if disinterest or inability. VB work is very low paying and puts your career at risk (you are less hirable than with other language skills.)
Professional developers generally avoid VB because it does not help their careers today. So doing VB, much like doing COBOL, marks you as doing low level code maintenance rather than probably developing new, exciting code. They are the least sought after jobs.
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Even inside of Microsoft which was built on BASIC and which pushed VB hard for years, VB fell to be the second and then third class citizen in their high level language ecosystem. C# took VB's place as Microsoft's chosen language for high level programming in 2000 - fourteen years ago.
F# became the partner to C# in 2005.
VB has been a programming backwater for the most part for a very long time now.
C++ has always been Microsoft's choice for low level programming.
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@scottalanmiller said:
BASIC went out of vogue around 1999. Today it is a mark of shame - only used to support legacy systems or by teams who never updates their skills.
True BASIC went out of vogue in the late 1980s. But VB revived it a little in the 1990s for low end desktop app development. It was never a good server side language and never popular outside of desktop Windows apps and the Small business market since it never ran on serious servers.
Today it might be the absolute last non-hobby language that I would recommend. There is always a better option than VB. It has no sweet spot, not even in labs, research or education.
I agree, I am a VB.Net programmer but C# will be your powerbase, to all language. VB will just waste your time.
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All of us over 30 started on BASIC, almost certainly, and pretty much anyone in the SMB realm who lived through the late 1990s did VB at some point and nearly anyone who went to college did because it is the fallback language that colleges can easily teach by showing the GUI and not teaching any programming so that non-programming professors can fake their way through the classes.... so the exposure rate is high. But as C# is free today, no need for VB.
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@scottalanmiller said:
All of us over 30 started on BASIC, almost certainly, and pretty much anyone in the SMB realm who lived through the late 1990s did VB at some point and nearly anyone who went to college did because it is the fallback language that colleges can easily teach by showing the GUI and not teaching any programming so that non-programming professors can fake their way through the classes.... so the exposure rate is high. But as C# is free today, no need for VB.
Yes, indeed.
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@azedas101 said:
I was once attending classes on the above. Please is the language still in vogue?
If the real question is, "What programming language to learn?" Then try Python.
BASIC was long ago and now far away.
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It's definitely in vogue in a retro, don't you remember when you were a kid in the 80's and used to copy games from a book into your Atari,(I hope my kids have better things to do) kind of way. Paul Bunn was one of the authors I remember.
Probably not in vogue in a , I'm doing classes in BASIC now, thinking it's relevant, kind of way. -
@ken said:
It's definitely in vogue in a retro, don't you remember when you were a kid in the 80's and used to copy games from a book into your Atari,(I hope my kids have better things to do) kind of way. Paul Bunn was one of the authors I remember.
Probably not in vogue in a , I'm doing classes in BASIC now, thinking it's relevant, kind of way.Is anyone actually doing it in a retro kind of way?
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Something that I've just noticed is that Microsoft's newest code editor, VS Code, completely skips Visual Basic support. While MS continues to support VB on their older platforms, they've totally abandoned it on their newer and cross platform toolsets. I think that this is pretty telling as to what we've known for decades, that VB is legacy support and MS wants it to go away.
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@scottalanmiller MS propose c# as a Platform Language, c++ as low level Language and now is in the web vagon with a ton of typescript. VB form the most remains as an app Scripting Language.
VS Code is basically for web languages. if you want serious compiled languages development on MS you need Visual Studio. -
@matteo-nunziati said in IS BASIC programming still in vogue?:
VS Code is basically for web languages. if you want serious compiled languages development on MS you need Visual Studio.
Not at all. VS Code isn't for web at all. It's not focused on web tech, languages, or anything else. Most modern languages use web as a main output, but VS Code has nothing making it lean towards web any more than normal VS does.
