Probably no other single feature of Visual Basic "notNet"

The Silver Medal of 2nd Place goes to honor an old friend that was dropped into the bit bucket of programming with the passing of VB6! I speak of none other than, The Variant Datatype.

Probably no other single feature of Visual Basic "notNet" better represents the philosophy of "fast, cheap, and loose". This image dogged VB right up to the introduction of VB.NET. I'm old enough to remember the introduction of Visual Basic 3.0 by Microsoft: "Oh Wow! Lookee here! With the new, improved Variant data type, you don't have to declare variables or nothin'. You can just think 'em up and code 'em."

Microsoft changed their tune pretty fast on that one and recommended declaring variables with a specific datatype almost immediately, leaving many of us to wonder, "If you can't use Variants, why have them?"

But while we're on the subject of datatypes, I should mention that a lot of datatypes have changed in addition to dropping Variant into wet cement. There's a new Char datatype and a Long datatype that is 64 bits. Decimal is way different. Short and Integer aren't the same length anymore.

And there is a new "Object" datatype that can be anything. Did I hear someone say, "Son of Variant"?