Thread

Show HN: Thoreau BASIC – What if BASIC hadn't gone out of fashion?

92 points · 54 comments · Gorsefound

qingcharles · 1791075263 · focus · HN ↗
I was writing BASIC code for everything until a few years ago -- VB.NET -- until it was really clear that it had become a totally second-class citizen and I switched to C#.
I still think VB.NET is vastly more readable than C/C#/Java etc.
1. vunderba · 1791128780 · focus · HN ↗
  I never ended up trying VB.NET, but I spent a lot of time in middle school playing with VB3 and later VB6. Being able to drag and drop components to quickly scaffold out a WYSIWYG GUI which you could then double-click on to create premade handlers was the veritable cat's meow.
  I feel like that kind of event-driven programming model was very intuitive, even for younger audiences.
  1. qingcharles · 1791131586 · focus · HN ↗
    All of that stuff is still in the latest Visual Studio 2026. VS2026 looks basically identical to VB6. It's still great if you're making little desktop apps by hand and you can back them with any .NET language, e.g. C# etc.
    pjmlp · 1791194312 · focus · HN ↗
    Some people love to complain in the whole VB vs VB.NET, because VB.NET dropped several VB 6 stuff on .NET 1.0, however .NET 2.0 re-introduced some stuff back, but they were no longer paying attention.
    <a href="https://www.codemag.com/article/0505051/What%27s-New-in-Visual-Basic-2005" rel="nofollow">https://www.codemag.com/article/0505051/What%27s-New-in-Visu...

Unofficial Hacker News client; not affiliated with Y Combinator.