VB6 won't die because the tool is geared to answer the problem "how do I get people to develop applications to solve problems themselves" and not "how do I make professional developers more productive and happy". VB6 solves a very broad problem whereas most other computer languages, IDEs and frameworks are geared for those who program for a living. And unfortunately, there really is no alternative. The fact that there are a lot of programmers today who grew into the profession who weren't programmers initially is not the point. VB6 is a tool that empowers a much wider audience to do their own thing than do "modern" programming languages.

VB.NET is more of a computer language that was wrapped around the .NET framework to try to "wean" VB programmers off of VB6. It won't work. You don't "get" what VB6 does for people if you think that. And it seems Microsoft simply doesn't get it either.

VB6 Staying power is also due to this fact: anybody can do programming with it. You don't need to get formal education in development to use VB6. It's a tool that was create to solve the problem "how do I get people to write their own applications and solve their problems themselves" and not "how do I make professional developers productive and happy". VB6's target audience is much wider than professional developers. And right now there is no alternative.

I agree with the previous poster.

I would not be surprised that there are a lot of programmers today who aren't necessarily people who got a formal education in development but grew into the position. They are often specialists in other fields of work and needed to develop tools that assisted in their specialty. VB6 really is great for people who need to whip up an application rapidly without too much fuss and I don't see any real alternatives out there. VB.NET comes close, but what you're doing is wrapping a language around OO and .NET instead of going the other way around that is, what is it that would make life easier for field experts to develop apps for their field specialty without needing to hire professional developers. VB6 fills that gap and there really is no alternative.

VB6 also addresses another niche: hobby programmers. Any non-professional programmers can get some pretty slick apps done in VB6 you wouldn't be able to do otherwise on any other platform.

If a company today decides to target this market with proper financial backing, and maintain some kind of VB6 compatibility, while abstracting away most of the .NET backend so you don't need to do windows.form.open.this.stupid.long.object("some string") ...

Holy Cow! I just got a double-liner on my Bullshit Bingo card!

Good job!

I like that -- however how do you deal with the fact that spammers can be all over the planet?

I think it was McAfee that did some reasearch that shows that something like 10 or so banks that keep funding these operations. Even if you managed to shut down all of them, all that will change is that the money is going to go underground.

You also have another issue. There's people making money spamming, and people making money providing spamming services by renting out access to their botnets. I think those raking in the big bucks are the ones that sell their spamming services to the gullible.

The international nature of the thing makes it dang hard. They only need to reach one spam haven to survive.

In the meantime, the only thing I personally have control over is my network. So yeah, to keep my end users happy, I spend money on a spam filtering gateway. I'm not happy about it ... since there's always some false positives (even if it has gotten better), but that's all I have as far as tools go. What you propose is fine and dandy, but right now ... individual admins don't have that much choice in the matter.

This being said -- Email should be regulated, like HAM radio is. If you had some kind of regulatory environment that requires some kind of "licensing" to operate Email servers with identifiers, I think it could also help out because it implies ALL mail senders would have to conform to regulations. And it has the benefit of decentralization. World-wide, HAM radio operators only have to follow local laws controlling them.

I don't know if in the "real world" it would work ... but having MTA operators be responsible for what leaves their servers and networks would probably be a step in the right direction.

-- Dingbat

How do you fix the problem then?

What you're saying is that filtering is not a fix.

I agree -- it's not a permanent fix. It only attacks the symptoms. But it's not a cure. And it has side-effects (false-positives). And it costs.

--
If we were talking about a disease, Bronchial Dilators & Aerosol Steroids for a treatment of Asthma isn't a fix either. Unfortunately, there's currently no cure for asthma right now (although research is always ongoing). If we were to continue the analogy -- asthma sufferers shouldn't take their Ventolin & Pulmicort because it's not a cure?
--

Until you produce a "cure" for spam, spam filters that do both connection-level blocking (ie: DNSBLs/Greylisting/IP Reputation blocking) and content-filtering (Bayesian & heuristics) are the primary tool we have in our arsenal. There are other tools out there, like Confirmed Email systems where someone has to jump through your hoops to be able to Email you while you block everyone by default, but these systems tend to be impractical.

Spam is fundamentally a socio-economic problem.

So how do you fix it?

-- Dingbat.

I've been living like that long before the "great recession" hit. Some call it voluntary simplicity. Frankly, I have tons of computer hand-me-downs, machines that are 1.0 Ghz+ that were running slow, but the people who gave them to me just went ahead and bought new PCs. Fine, I just upped the ram, put XP or Linux on them and the machines run fine. I still have CRT TVs in my house, the only LCD display that I have is the one that I got used from a friend who sold me his old 17" LCD for peanuts, and a couple of recycled laptops. I don't think I've spent more than a couple of hundred bucks on new electronics for the past 5 years. There's just no point. My car is a 1997 for Taurus Station Wagon with 200,000 km on it. Runs fine. I put maybe 500$/year of maintenance on it. Last repair (last week) was to change the muffler. The only big "new" thing that I bought in the past 10 years was a pop-up camper when the Canadian dollar was on par with the US dollar in 2008 which we pull with an old Jeep Cherokee. The money I've saved over the years doing stuff myself has made it possible for me to pay off my mortgage real fast. I bought my house in 2002. It's already payed off. No debt. Lots of savings. To me -- that's way more important than "Oooh, New! Shiny!".