Except that didn't happen at all. Visual Basic still exists.
From Microsoft (2020):
> One of the major benefits of using Visual Basic is that the language has been stable for a very long time.
(Source: Microsoft, on Visual Basic support in .NET 5: https://devblogs.microsoft.com/vbteam/visual-basic-support-p...)
As of January 2023, the latest version of Visual Studio (2022) still offers to scaffold me a new Visual Basic project!
And VB exists in other forms, too. The other day, I was coding VBA macros for an Excel spreadsheet for my business. Worked great and saved me a bunch of time.
I personally know developers who switched careers after Microsoft transitioned to .Net. I worked with them around 2001.
They didn't understand OOP concepts and were not interested in having to relearn everything. It felt totally unfamiliar and strange to them. Microsoft tried to make the syntax somewhat familiar, but at the end of the day .Net is an object-oriented programming language and VB6, try as it might, was not. And that was too steep of a hill to climb for them.
As if COM as used in VB6 isn't OOP.
But for most "Microsoft shops", VB6 was a dead end, and that left a lot of VB developers out in the cold. They had to reskill with the .NET stuff (significant, especially in the early 2000s), or starve.
This always baffles me. It doesn't surprise me, but it baffles me. Why are so many professional developers having to "reskill" to adapt to a new language? We're not necessarily talking about new domains (that would be different, there's a lot I don't know about server administration and automation, for instance, given my background primarily with embedded and desktop systems). But a language? And a procedural/imperative language? VB, C, C++, Pascal, Delphi, C#, Java, JavaScript, Ada, Python, Rust, Go, Fortran, etc. are all, fundamentally, procedural/imperative languages with varying degrees of OO, functional, and metaprogramming capabilities distinguishing between them. Some are bigger jumps (I'd point to Rust as the biggest in that group) than others, but what "reskilling" does a programmer or developer need when switching between languages in roughly the same language family? It's not like they had to jump to Haskell or Prolog or something that was majorly different.
There are differences, but the similarities are more than superficial. Some of my first apps were in 6, and then I transitioned to VB.NET in the early 2000s. At the very least, it pretty familiar and intuitive.
Even VBA is pretty similar to the VB.NET apps I developed in terms of OOP, syntax, autocompletion in the editor, event handlers, and so on.
Again, there are definitely differences, but there was no "[relearning] software development and getting intern like opportunities" like the comment I was replying to said, and my knowledge and experience was definitely not "worth exactly zero." It was just an evolution.
... What?! Amazing they still have running tooling to build it, and I don't even want to know what bad surprises hide in the redistributable runtime.
And yes, I hopped off the .net train after 15 years of using c# and took a job writing python, and some JavaScript. I had done JavaScript before, using jQuery. Now I had to learn react. And they used MongiDB as the primary data platform. I had spent the last decade working with SQL.
And it was fine, because my skill isn't tied to a single tool.
Sure, you can write-in-C in all languages, as the saying goes. But to be a professional, and to paid as a professional, requires a lot more.
A C programmer during the same time period saw almost no changes to their language or job opportunities.
Not to mention with a community that built an alternative implementation so strong that MS ended up buying the company the emerged from it. And this was before .Net Core was fully open sourced.
I’m not worried about C# or .Net getting nuked.
