The Lesson from BASIC, Visual Basic, and VB.NET

This week Microsoft announced that VB.NET would receive no enhancements. In effect, Microsoft has announced the death of VB.NET. And while some developers may grieve over the loss of their favorite language, we should look at the lesson of VB.NET.

But first, let's review the history of BASIC, the predecessor of VB.NET.

BASIC has a long history, and Microsoft was there for most of it. Invented in the mid-1960s, BASIC was a simple interpreter, designed for timeshare systems and people who were not programmers. The major competing languages, the programming languages one could use instead of BASIC were FORTRAN and COBOL. BASIC, while less powerful, was much easier to use than any of the alternatives.

Small home computers were a natural for BASIC. Microsoft saw an opportunity and built BASIC for the Apple II, Commodore's PET and CBM, Radio Shack's TRS-80, and many others. Wherever you turned, BASIC was available. It was the lingua franca of programming, which made it valuable.

BASIC was popular, but its roots in timeshare made it a text-oriented language. (To be fair, all other languages were text-oriented, too.) As computers become more popular, programmers had to manipulate hardware directly to use special effects such as colors and graphics. Microsoft helped, by enhancing the language with commands for graphics and other hardware such as sound. BASIC remained the premiere language for programming because it was powerful enough (or good enough) to get the job done.

Microsoft's Windows posed a challenge to BASIC. Even with its enhancements for graphics, BASIC was not compatible with the event-driven model of Windows. Microsoft's answer was Visual Basic, a new language that shared some keywords with BASIC but little else. The new Visual Basic was a completely different language, even more powerful than the biggest "Disk BASIC" Microsoft ever released. Microsoft's other language for Windows, Visual C++, was powerful but hard to use. Visual Basic was less powerful but much easier to use, and it had better support for COM. The ease of use and COM support provided value to developers.

Microsoft's .NET posed a second challenge to Visual Basic, which was not compatible with the new architecture the .NET framework. Microsoft's answer was VB.NET, a redesign that looked a lot like C# but with some keywords retained from Visual Basic.

For the past two decades (almost), VB.NET has been a supported language in Microsoft's world, living beside C#. That coexistence now comes to an end, with C# getting upgrades and VB.NET getting... very little.

The problem with VB.NET (as I see it) is that VB.NET was too close, too similar to C#. VB.NET offered little that was different (or better) than C#. Thus, when picking a language for a new project, one could pick C# or VB.NET and be assured that it would work.

But being similar, for programming languages, is not a good thing. Different languages should be different. They should offer different programming constructs and different capabilities, because the differences can provide value.

C++ is different from C, and while C++ can compile and run every C program, the differences between C++ and C are enough that both languages offer value.

Python and Ruby are different enough that both can exist. Both offer value to the programmer.

C# and Java are close cousins, and one could argue that they too are too similar to co-exist. For this case, it may be that the sponsoring companies (Microsoft for C#, Oracle for Java) is enough of a difference. For these languages, the relationship with the sponsoring company is the value.

But VB.NET was too close to C#. Anything you could do in VB.NET you could do in C#, and usually with no additional effort. VB.NET offered nothing of distinct value.

We should note that the end of VB.NET does not mean the end of BASIC. There are other versions of BASIC, each quite different from VB.NET and C#. These different versions may continue to thrive and provide value to programmers.

Sometimes, being different is important.