Visual Basic is now an object-oriented language. Nobody quite understood what that meant with Visual Basic version 4. Now we do.
The class model of version 4 was fundamentally flawed. Many object-oriented features were missing, and it was a struggle, requiring ugly hacks and tedious workarounds, to write class-based programs in Visual Basic. Still, the improvement was so great from version 3 to version 4 that most people were willing to give Visual Basic the benefit of the doubt. It wasn’t perfect, but we didn’t necessarily know enough to understand where the object limits really were anyway.
But with version 5, I for one am not letting Visual Basic get away with anything. We’re not pioneers any more. This is the second object-oriented version, and it should allow us to do the things that other object-oriented languages allow. Visual Basic shouldn’t be like C++ or SmallTalk or Delphi or any other language, but it should allow us to do what needs to be done. We should be able to work with the language, not around it, to write efficient object-oriented code.
So how does Visual Basic version 5 measure up? Again, we’ll find out. I won’t be doing a feature by feature comparison with any other language, but neither will I shy away from criticism if Visual Basic fails to make object-oriented programming easy.