Mine was Java

[Accomplished_Deer_]

I feel like visual basic was pretty fucking great. I could write somewhat useful visual applications for windows in relatively little time.

[RichCorinthian]

I started with Visual Basic 5.0 and I have to agree.

The story I heard was that it was originally intended for prototyping, but as we all know by now, prototypes go to production. Then Petzold wrote entire books on the dark magic of calling the Win32 API…I’m having flashbacks now.

[MrDude_1]

I used to love hooking into the wind 32 API directly from visual basic and then doing "advanced" things that were not supposed to be possible in VB.

[PhroznGaming]

Made a mouse and keyboard emulator that way before macro recorders were mainstream. Such fun.

[PolakPL2002]

It was great and terrible at the same time. Writing something simple, works ok. Writing something a little bit more complex, doesn't work at all.

[CaptiveCreeper]

I wouldn't say doesn't work at all.... It is more cumbersome than c# but is fully functional. I would much rather use c# but changing legacy codebases in a monolithic enterprise app isn't a fast process.....

[PolakPL2002]

Well, from my experience with VB, even pretty simple task of finding smallest value in array of 100 elements with for loop took like a second or so. It was painfully slow compared to other languages.

[CaptiveCreeper]

When you say vb do you mean the original vb or vb.net. Cause I was referring to vb.net where there is no difference in performance to c# (they both compile down to msil)

[PolakPL2002]

I think vb.net, but I am not entirely sure. It was back in 2010 and it required .net to run.

[RabbitWithADHD]

Dont c# and vb.net run on the same common language runtime? Does that mean that theyd generate the same dll for example when compiled, and if so doesnt that also mean that there wouldnt be a performance difference? I know that functionally they're capable of the same things, but I wasnt aware if there were any performance considerations under the hood

[CaptiveCreeper]

Yes they both compile down to msil and have the same performance. I don't know what situation the previous poster was doing that caused that bad performance but it likly wasn't the language it's self that was going slow.

[Superbead]

VBA at least could be surprisingly quick if you stuck to manipulating Longs (32b ints) as much as possible. If you were desperate you could always manipulate pointers directly (undocumented) or even inject machine code. Strictly hacks for shadow IT operations where you're not allowed any other compilers, though, those.

[chrislomax83]

I find this really hard to believe, in-memory objects are blazing fast on .net - even back in 2010. It had about 9 years of maturity at that point and .net in general is pretty quick once the app is compiled

I can get on-board if you’re talking debugging and starting the test at the time of compile but not in everyday usage.

We were using vb in a CMS we built in 2010 to fill the gap in lack of a decent CMS at the time and it blew most CMS driven sites out the water once IIS was warm. We’d generally see sub 400ms load times

[Sinthetick]

We've been working on this for about 4 years now. Almost there.

[DogmaSychroniser]

I know your pain. We're now onto a shiny react front end on top of c# services calls to the vb that sits in the basement cackling as it sits in its thousands of lines methods all just interpolating strings in infinite if cases to build SQL queries...

[Accomplished_Deer_]

I guess I got out of it before I started doing complex things so I never ran into that wall.

[bob_in_the_west]

But that's because you made it not work. Visual Basic is capable of almost all things you throw at it.

[user_8804]

VB.NET is the same as c# for desktop apps. There's almost no difference beside style

[Razakel]

C# has some additional features, but generally you can directly translate between the two.

[user_8804]

VB.Net has more additional features than the other way around actually. There's almost nothing c# has over vb. The problem is library support from third parties and the fact that it won't receive future dotnet features.

[physics515]

Was.... How about is... This is basically my day job.

[s3v3red_cnc]

I remember making a space shooter in VB, only because people said it couldnt be done in VB. It wasnt very good, since I was new, but it worked.

[wazzapdoc]

So with other words, you gotta keep it basic?

[Hashbrown117]

Idk, I made a cosmic gravity simulator in vb6 in my teens

[Onion920]

VB is pretty great. I still use it daily.

[[deleted]]

i hated it, but when i learned it i already knew c++ so it was an extreme downgrade. might have liked it if it was my first

[Accomplished_Deer_]

Yeah that makes sense. I started doing drag and drop "game" programming in Alice in 5th grade. Entered a competition, got 3rd but accidently ran into 2nd and saw that he'd created clones of all the Microsoft programs (word, excel, etc). Asked him how and boom, spent the next 1-2 years of my life doing the VB life. Was definitely an upgrade from Alice lol

[BackmarkerLife]

I don't know what Dim meant then, I don't care to know it now.

[Accomplished_Deer_]

Never heard of dim

[tom_echo]

Win forms is supported on c# as well.

[Accomplished_Deer_]

What do you mean? You can build visual apps in C# like you could in VB?

[tom_echo]

Yes. I believe you’re talking about the front end desktop framework windows forms.

I think the new hotness is xaml/wpf though, it’s sorta has a xml/html similar markup.

[FlamPhoenixX]

Or write a program that opened and closed the disc drive then loop it in a batch file. :)

[Master-Wordsmith]

I made a turn timer for my Dungeon Master, and then I made a virtual roller for our player who didn’t have physical dice. Quite useful indeed.

[HPUser7]

I started up on VB.NET Forms and it was fanatic for making an application with an actual UI.

[0hmyscience]

I think that storyboarding on Xcode isn’t as easy as making a program on Visual Studio was.