{"slug": "visual-basic-6", "name": "Visual Basic 6", "category": "editors", "category_name": "Editors and IDEs", "description": "", "recommenders": 6, "commenters": 7, "warners": 1, "score": 4.334, "rising": -1.96, "first": "2025-12-04", "latest": "2026-05-11", "why": "I loved how you can 'paint' controls, and it generates functions for you to fill in based on events.", "why_is_quote": true, "has_verdict": false, "sentiment": {"recommend": 6, "neutral": 0, "compare": 0, "warn": 1}, "spark": [0, 1, 0, 1, 0, 0, 4, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0], "listed": true, "loved": [], "caveat": "", "short_quote": "I loved how you can 'paint' controls, and it generates functions for you to fill in based on events.", "kind": "", "icon": false, "domain": null, "github_repo": null, "official_url": "", "pricing": "", "aliases": ["Visual Basic 6"], "verdict": null, "praise": [{"label": "", "summary": "", "quotes": [{"id": 767798864, "item_id": 47987429, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47987429", "by": "antisol", "date": "2026-05-02", "version": null, "stance": "recommend", "quote": "That debugger was amazing.", "excerpt": "I second GP's sentiment. That debugger was amazing. I've never seen anything that can touch it to this day. Tell you more: you could also just run code to do things like change variables in the immediate window while execution was paused, so e.g that example where you want to re-run some loop: first you drag the PC arrow back to above the loop as GP already described, then in the immediate window you can just run thi", "context": "", "use_case": "Debugging", "switched_from": "", "story": "What did you love about VB6?"}, {"id": 767727392, "item_id": 47982962, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47982962", "by": "jemmyw", "date": "2026-05-01", "version": null, "stance": "recommend", "quote": "I really enjoyed working on it", "excerpt": "My first job was VB6 and I really enjoyed working on it. It was pretty late in it's life - .NET had just come out when I started. The existing program I was working on was pretty complex though. I spent a year rewriting the database layer (well, it wasn't a layer when I started but it was by the end) from an old cursor / file based system to use SQL server. That extended the lifetime of the product by quite a margin ", "context": "former VB6 developer, left in 2007", "use_case": "Desktop app development", "switched_from": "", "story": "What did you love about VB6?"}, {"id": 767720480, "item_id": 47982530, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47982530", "by": "MichaelApproved", "date": "2026-05-01", "version": null, "stance": "recommend", "quote": "One of the programs I enjoyed writing the most with VB6", "excerpt": "One of the programs I enjoyed writing the most with VB6 was a telephony capable IM program. Over dial up! The IM portion was simple logic but the real-time voice was a challenge back then because audio compression was in its infancy. The few real-time compression libraries that existed were expensive to license and some even required royalties. Way out of my league. Writing my own compression algorithm was way beyond", "context": "", "use_case": "Desktop app development", "switched_from": "", "story": "What did you love about VB6?"}, {"id": 767713568, "item_id": 47982098, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47982098", "by": "orionblastar", "date": "2026-05-01", "version": null, "stance": "recommend", "quote": "I loved how you can 'paint' controls, and it generates functions for you to fill in based on events.", "excerpt": "I loved how you can 'paint' controls, and it generates functions for you to fill in based on events. I also liked the Wizard for creating apps. They did a Java BASIC language Jabaco to work like VB6 and compile to Java files. https://www.jabaco.org/ I think someone should take it over and remove the technical debt.", "context": "", "use_case": "GUI app development", "switched_from": "", "story": "What did you love about VB6?"}, {"id": 755228609, "item_id": 47201788, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47201788", "by": "linguae", "date": "2026-02-28", "version": null, "stance": "recommend", "quote": "I have fond memories of Windows 95/NT 4/98/2000, Office 97, and Visual Basic 6.", "excerpt": "Steve Jobs is famous for his 1996 quote about Microsoft not having taste (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UiOzGI4MqSU). I disagree; as much as I love the classic Mac OS and Jobs-era Mac OS X, and despite my feelings about Microsoft's monopolistic behavior, 1995-2000 Microsoft's user interfaces were quite tasteful, in my opinion, and this was Microsoft's most tasteful period. I have fond memories of Windows 95/NT 4/98", "context": "", "use_case": "", "switched_from": "", "story": "The Windows 95 user interface: A case study in usability engineering (1996)"}]}], "caveats": [], "who": [{"by": "jemmyw", "context": "former VB6 developer, left in 2007", "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47982962", "date": "2026-05-01"}], "tags": [], "use_cases": ["desktop app development", "debugging", "gui app development"], "compared": [{"slug": "delphi", "name": "Delphi", "co": 1, "switched_from": 0, "switched_to": 1}], "makers": [], "threads": [{"url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47981961", "title": "What did you love about VB6?", "mentions": 4}, {"url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48039249", "title": "I'm writing a history of Visual Basic, Chapter 1 is up", "mentions": 1}, {"url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47200904", "title": "The Windows 95 user interface: A case study in usability engineering (1996)", "mentions": 1}, {"url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46145797", "title": "Programming peaked", "mentions": 1}], "sentiment_by_month": {"2025-11": {}, "2025-12": {"recommend": 1}, "2026-01": {}, "2026-02": {"recommend": 1}, "2026-03": {}, "2026-04": {}, "2026-05": {"recommend": 4, "warn": 1}, "2026-06": {}, "2026-07": {}, "2026-08": {}, "2026-09": {}, "2026-10": {}}, "versions": [], "version_unnamed": 0, "family_ref": null, "runs_on": null, "lines": [], "quotes": [{"id": 769481824, "item_id": 48092614, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48092614", "by": "pjmlp", "date": "2026-05-11", "version": null, "stance": "warn", "quote": "", "excerpt": "VB.NET is open source, supports AOT, and there is little else that VB 6 does better, other than COM integration, which .NET was always a bit lower level https://github.com/dotnet/roslyn Now I bet what you mean is the graphical part, and yes that is only partial open source.", "context": "", "use_case": "", "switched_from": "", "story": "I'm writing a history of Visual Basic, Chapter 1 is up"}, {"id": 767798864, "item_id": 47987429, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47987429", "by": "antisol", "date": "2026-05-02", "version": null, "stance": "recommend", "quote": "That debugger was amazing.", "excerpt": "I second GP's sentiment. That debugger was amazing. I've never seen anything that can touch it to this day. Tell you more: you could also just run code to do things like change variables in the immediate window while execution was paused, so e.g that example where you want to re-run some loop: first you drag the PC arrow back to above the loop as GP already described, then in the immediate window you can just run thi", "context": "", "use_case": "Debugging", "switched_from": "", "story": "What did you love about VB6?"}, {"id": 767727392, "item_id": 47982962, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47982962", "by": "jemmyw", "date": "2026-05-01", "version": null, "stance": "recommend", "quote": "I really enjoyed working on it", "excerpt": "My first job was VB6 and I really enjoyed working on it. It was pretty late in it's life - .NET had just come out when I started. The existing program I was working on was pretty complex though. I spent a year rewriting the database layer (well, it wasn't a layer when I started but it was by the end) from an old cursor / file based system to use SQL server. That extended the lifetime of the product by quite a margin ", "context": "former VB6 developer, left in 2007", "use_case": "Desktop app development", "switched_from": "", "story": "What did you love about VB6?"}, {"id": 767720480, "item_id": 47982530, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47982530", "by": "MichaelApproved", "date": "2026-05-01", "version": null, "stance": "recommend", "quote": "One of the programs I enjoyed writing the most with VB6", "excerpt": "One of the programs I enjoyed writing the most with VB6 was a telephony capable IM program. Over dial up! The IM portion was simple logic but the real-time voice was a challenge back then because audio compression was in its infancy. The few real-time compression libraries that existed were expensive to license and some even required royalties. Way out of my league. Writing my own compression algorithm was way beyond", "context": "", "use_case": "Desktop app development", "switched_from": "", "story": "What did you love about VB6?"}, {"id": 767713568, "item_id": 47982098, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47982098", "by": "orionblastar", "date": "2026-05-01", "version": null, "stance": "recommend", "quote": "I loved how you can 'paint' controls, and it generates functions for you to fill in based on events.", "excerpt": "I loved how you can 'paint' controls, and it generates functions for you to fill in based on events. I also liked the Wizard for creating apps. They did a Java BASIC language Jabaco to work like VB6 and compile to Java files. https://www.jabaco.org/ I think someone should take it over and remove the technical debt.", "context": "", "use_case": "GUI app development", "switched_from": "", "story": "What did you love about VB6?"}, {"id": 755228609, "item_id": 47201788, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47201788", "by": "linguae", "date": "2026-02-28", "version": null, "stance": "recommend", "quote": "I have fond memories of Windows 95/NT 4/98/2000, Office 97, and Visual Basic 6.", "excerpt": "Steve Jobs is famous for his 1996 quote about Microsoft not having taste (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UiOzGI4MqSU). I disagree; as much as I love the classic Mac OS and Jobs-era Mac OS X, and despite my feelings about Microsoft's monopolistic behavior, 1995-2000 Microsoft's user interfaces were quite tasteful, in my opinion, and this was Microsoft's most tasteful period. I have fond memories of Windows 95/NT 4/98", "context": "", "use_case": "", "switched_from": "", "story": "The Windows 95 user interface: A case study in usability engineering (1996)"}, {"id": 738386145, "item_id": 46149134, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46149134", "by": "mikewarot", "date": "2025-12-04", "version": null, "stance": "recommend", "quote": "allowed drag and drop GUI application development", "excerpt": "It's my belief that we peaked on January 1, 2000. We had successfully released most of the stress baked into the worlds infrastructure with the sudden phase change of \"backward compatibility\" caused by the IBM 360 series introduction decades earlier. We had Windows 2000, a server operating system that worked well as a desktop. Both Visual Basic 6 (aka VB6) and Borland Delphi allowed drag and drop GUI application deve", "context": "", "use_case": "", "switched_from": "", "story": "Programming peaked"}]}