21 engineers on Hacker News describe using Visual Basic first-hand: 7 endorse it, 5 regret it, 1 are mixed.
“While you are in the happy path, you fly. But if you try something outside that, it's almost impossible.”
mixed · production · gus_massa · 2025-11-19 · source ↗ · wrong label?“I messed around with VB6 as a kid. It was an amazingly intuitive experience to work with forms, buttons, and hooking up simple actions”
endorse · personal · mrkeen · 2024-12-17 · source ↗ · wrong label?“I actually know my VB6 code is still running in prod. VB6 did let me learn to program very valuable utilities from scratch”
endorse · production · mdeeks · 2023-09-11 · source ↗ · wrong label?“I was doing VB6 (discontinued in 2001) and C++/MFC (Windows). ... I said never again.”
regret · production · 9 yr · scarface74 · 2022-10-06 · source ↗ · wrong label?“I used it for decades when I was young, and I have never again used anything that was as good, as simple”
endorse · personal · fwsgonzo · 2022-05-06 · source ↗ · wrong label?“we'd get everything done in record time, blazingly fast.”
endorse · production · 734129837261 · 2019-12-23 · source ↗ · wrong label?“We use Visual Basic 6 for a lot more than we should at work...going back to that from using Python, Ruby, and even PHP was a shock.”
regret · production · bluedino · 2019-12-19 · source ↗ · wrong label?“the visual basic 5 ide ran lightning fast”
endorse · production · iforgotpassword · 2018-07-22 · source ↗ · wrong label?“It was incredibly useful for basically zero iteration time for development.”
endorse · personal · nomel · 2017-12-09 · source ↗ · wrong label?“stop "coding" in VisualBasic ;-) try other languages”
regret · personal · patrics123 · 2017-09-24 · source ↗ · wrong label?“In retrospective, this has to be the best investment of 120DM (Deutsche Mark) ever made.”
endorse · personal · nom · 2016-11-13 · source ↗ · wrong label?“stuff still hanging of asp and vb6 which is falling to bits.”
regret · production · meaty · 2012-12-08 · source ↗ · wrong label?“especially Visual Basic 6 (I hate Microsoft products)”
regret · personal · jorgecastillo · 2011-12-26 · source ↗ · wrong label?“The first seventeen years of my career were PC Basic, DEC PDP/VAX Basic, and Visual Basic.”
neutral · production · ChicagoDave · 2022-12-18 · source ↗ · wrong label?“In performing a source code review of what was a monolith written entirely in Visual Basic 6”
neutral · production · bokohut · 2022-12-06 · source ↗ · wrong label?“I can write c#, vb6 and .net, frontend I can do JavaScript, php, tie into MySQL”
neutral · production · marak830 · 2017-09-29 · source ↗ · wrong label?“I switched the coding from COBOL to VB4 and Oracle and then Java”
neutral · production · kpgraham · 2015-05-06 · source ↗ · wrong label?“I took a course that taught Visual Basic and also QBasic in junior high. It bored me because we were making very simple apps”
neutral · personal · notastartup · 2014-01-04 · source ↗ · wrong label?“including VB code generation as I tend to use that a lot for scripting MS Office.”
neutral · personal · joelschw · 2013-11-26 · source ↗ · wrong label?“I believe that we use VB6 and .NET because that's one of the two main platforms student learn (the other being Java)”
neutral · production · GFischer · 2011-11-15 · source ↗ · wrong label?