Visual Basic and the Kremlinologists
by Ron Petrusha06/20/2001
From the '50s through the '80s, the American study of Soviet politics was dominated by the school of Kremlinology. Studying what they believed was the internal power struggle within the Communist Party and its ruling politburo, Kremlinologists carefully examined the relative position of the Soviet leadership as they stood on Lenin's tomb during major ceremonies, like May Day and the anniversary of the Great October Socialist Revolution.
In doing so, they made a number of rather dubious assumptions about Soviet politics and society, in particular that social forces were relatively unimportant, and that the motive force in Soviet politics was individual egotism and the drive for individual self-aggrandizement. In the end, though, Kremlinology proved to be much more a reflection of its proponent's beliefs and motivation than it was an objective analysis of the dynamics of the Soviet political system.
You may be wondering (and for good reason) what this has to do with Visual Basic. For almost the last year, it seems to me, many Visual Basic programmers have been applying the principles of Kremlinology to the world of programming using Microsoft technologies. Since the Microsoft Professional Developers' Conference last summer in Orlando, when C# and the .NET Framework were announced, Visual Basic programmers have been carefully scrutinizing the landscape. And what they saw (or thought they saw) was hardly encouraging. Each mention of C#, each demo written in C# and not in Visual Basic, each discussion of language independence, and each mention of the demise of VBScript provided mounting evidence that Microsoft was no longer committed to Visual Basic, and that Microsoft instead was promoting C# as its language of choice.
In his Tech Ed keynote on Tuesday, Bill Gates squarely addressed the issue of Visual Basic and its future by reaffirming Microsoft's commitment to Visual Basic. The timing is not coincidental. Ten years ago in May, in his keynote at COMDEX in Atlanta, Gates had announced version 1.0 of Visual Basic, the first graphical RAD programming environment for Microsoft Windows.
Now, ten years later, there are over 8 million VB programmers worldwide, according to Gates' estimate. Although the numbers are approximate at best, it is clear that VB has the largest installed base of any programming language in world history by an overwhelming margin. More than that, VB's ease of use and accessibility has brought the world of programming to millions of people who otherwise were too intimidated to become deeply involved with computers. In the sense that it has touched and in some cases profoundly transformed people's lives, VB has been a truly revolutionary product.
Part of the reason for this continuing commitment is precisely the fact that VB has somewhere in the neighborhood of 8 million programmers, many of whom not only use VB out of necessity, but are actually passionate about it. Certainly Gates and Microsoft know that upgrading an installed base from one version to another is difficult enough. Moving them from one programming language to another programming language that is syntactically very different is all but impossible. From the standpoint of the numbers alone, it would be an unprecedented blunder on the part of Microsoft--a company that's survived and prospered precisely because of its ability to avoid such colossal miscalculations--to abandon its loyal VB developers in the vain hope that they would willingly embrace C#.
But the numbers alone, and the revenue generated by those numbers, don't tell the whole story. Another reason for this continuing commitment to VB was evident when the audience saw a demo of Donkey.bas, a game that Gates developed using Microsoft Basic on a prototype IBM PC. This was, Gates mentioned, the last piece of professional software that he developed. And Gates, after all, was the co-creator of Microsoft Basic, the company's first product. From Donkey.bas to his focus on a universal batch language to VB.NET, it seems to me that Gates has made it abundantly and consistently clear that he has a continuing passion for Basic.
What, then, accounts for VB programmers' feelings of neglect? I suspect that the major theme of Gates' keynote--that the emergence of a new breed of application in the digital age requires a new generation of software tools--is relevant here. As I'd argued in my recent forum article, VB.NET: Too much too fast?, Visual Basic has increasingly been showing signs of age, and VB.NET represents a clear attempt to revitalize VB so that it remains a viable tool for the next generation of software development.
Also relevant, perhaps, is Gates' realization that, as we move into the new generation of computing, no one language will dominate. Gates believes that this decade will be a period of lively innovation in development tools and that numbers of new programming languages will emerge. This in many ways is another theme that Microsoft has consistently championed and has advanced to the forefront with its .NET platform: you should be able to use a language that you know and feel comfortable with to develop the applications and components that you need.
To put it another way, Gates is implying that in the next decade there will be intense competition in the programming language market. And this thought leads us back to the Kremlinologists, who, I argued, were superimposing their own views of themselves onto the political systems they were studying. Visual Basic programmers, of course, have long been known for their sense of inferiority when compared to C++ and Java (and now C#) programmers. Like the Kremlinologists, many VB programmers are expressing their own sense of inferiority by questioning Microsoft's motivation in introducing the .NET platform and upgrading Visual Basic. And like the effort of the Kremlinologists, this effort is similarly misguided. Microsoft remains as committed as it ever has been to Visual Basic. And in this forthcoming version of the product, it has created a programming language and development environment that will insure Visual Basic's continued success and growth for years to come.
