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Ask HN: Why did Visual Basic die?

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Re: Ask HN: Why did Visual Basic die?

#271

Post by nickpsecurity »

dwheeler wrote: post #87

Visual Basic (both of them) still exist, but their use has dropped dramatically through some big changes: * "Visual .NET" (aka "Visual Fred" http://catb.org/jargon/html/V/Visual-Fred.html ) was released by Microsoft. This was an incompatible language confusingly also called Visual Basic. I don't think Microsoft realized how angry this made developers and businesses, who were being asked to spend hundreds of billions…

I was using Visual Basic 6 for throwing GUI's together. I loved how it loaded and iterated in one second on a 400MHz P3. Then, we got Visual Basic .NET. It took forever to start up. Then, it wasn't really Visual Basic. Then, iterations were slower.

It was going to be a rough trip. I figured I might as well learn something different so the headaches have more of a payoff. I stayed on Visual Basic 6 for a while before quitting it. I'm using Python now and it still doesn't feel as easy as VB6 did.

Re: Ask HN: Why did Visual Basic die?

#272

Post by TrackerFF »

j45 wrote: post #232
TrackerFF wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Pre-face: I write a lot of VBA VBA is kind of the result of people only - ONLY - wanting to use Excel for everything. I work with those people. They have mastered excel, but have little to zero interest in learning anything else, and would rather see the world be built around excel. So you (like me) get tasked with building applications and forms in VBA. I was STOKED when MS announced Python for excel, but alas, turn…

VB is not VBA, VBA was a relatively small subset. I might be mistaken but wasn't VBA brought into Excel as a familiar element from the VB world? It is true though that some of the more purer or more initial concepts of VB likely live on in the VBA subsets of Excel. And Access.

VBA works fine if you want to create macros and automate various things for your spreadsheets, but the problem is that the end user want / demand full-blown applications layered over their spreadsheets. The last thing I worked on was a CRUD -interface where the user could read and write data from their spreadsheet, to a azure DB.

It wasn't difficult, but at its core, I had to do it because the end users didn't feel like using some other interface - they really didn't want to leave their excel spreadsheet.

Re: Ask HN: Why did Visual Basic die?

#273

Post by daydreamtrip »

vb-8448 wrote: post #48
mamonster wrote: post #8

Does VBA for Excel count? Because if it does then VBA for Excel has reached the"nuclear resistant cockroach" level in finance. You wouldn't believe what sort of processes in very big banks/financial institutions are built using 10 year old VBA macros. In fact, VBA consulting for finance is a very juicy cottage industry at least in Europe to this very day.

So true!!! :D :D :D If Excel stops working, financial institutions around the world would collapse.

Python was just added to Excel so there's not much chance of that

Re: Ask HN: Why did Visual Basic die?

#274

Post by rightbyte »

ethbr1 wrote: post #242
eropple wrote: post #196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While maybe that's true, that doesn't map to my experience very well. After QBasic, I wrote a lot of Visual Basic 5 and 6. I had poked at C, but would not say I knew it, and had never done anything useful in the language. But I did exactly one thing in VB.NET before trying C# and realizing that it really did encapsulate and present a better way to think about code. It's not perfect, but it's much, much better--and in…

I've worked with a ton (too many) VB programmers by virtue of the work that I do (UI automation). My experience all suggests that pure-VB (even .NET) is a treacherous dead-end, because it doesn't scale in terms of complexity and project size, and the point at which is stops scaling is often unrealized by its developers. - VB(.NET) is amazing for small, simple gadgets. - VB(.NET) is terrible for large or complex syste…

> VB(.NET) is terrible for large or complex systems.

Compared to what? It got support for multiple files and even luxuries like namespaces.

Re: Ask HN: Why did Visual Basic die?

#275

Post by taeric »

JackMorgan wrote: post #234
yc-kraln wrote: post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was with you until "... so is writing a React frontend". No. No it's not. Making a functional UI in visual basic is childs play compared to the absolute cesspit of NIH and feature treadmill that frontend web development has become. You are gatekeeping with strawmen.

I was trying to compare like for like on features. Slapping together a few fields and a button in react and posting the results to an unauthorized endpoint doesn't feel any more difficult to me than the same in VB. However, it's certainly an order of magnitude more complex to use react with all the features expected of modern development with design systems, auth/z, logging, monitoring, etc.

I'm deploying react to a CDN for a living, and I would have no idea how to instruct someone to "slap together a few fields and a button" and put it somewhere meaningful. As a kid, I remember making full blown D&D character sheets based on an easy Access backend. You could even print them out.

I want to, but I just can't back any claim that things have gotten easier for pretty much anything. With a ton of extra power on the compute side, parts of the machine have gotten attainable. But nothing about the process is easier along the way.

Re: Ask HN: Why did Visual Basic die?

#276

Post by gwbas1c »

I learned Visual Basic (6) a few months before I learned C#.

Hands-down, C# was a much better language. Visual Basic (the language) always left me feeling dirty compared to C#. Both languages have similar learning curves for a novice; but C# includes industrial strength features that allow code written by a novice to be refactored instead of rewritten when the need comes along.

Both languages have a similar way for designing a Windows Forms UI, and the API for working with the UI from code was generally similar. Once C# came around, there really wasn't a reason for using Visual Basic 6 for a quick-and-dirty UI because you could do the same thing in C# in the same amount of time. (So why waste your time with Visual Basic at that point?)

I personally think the "VB.Net" situation is what really killed Visual Basic. There really was no reason to force everyone to rewrite their projects, because VB.Net didn't "add" anything. Instead, VB.Net turned into a smell that someone wasn't savvy enough to use "real" C#.

I personally don't know when I'd pick Visual Basic 6 over C# for a Windows application; but I have a pretty serious development background. I also noticed that novice developers tended to come up to speed with C# rather quickly, so I'm not sure if the more casual nature of Visual Basic 6 really helped anyone.

Re: Ask HN: Why did Visual Basic die?

#277

Post by JohnBooty »

muststopmyths wrote: post #195
bonzini wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Serious question: what is a good alternative to Access (edit: to build a GUI frontend to a database)? The database design tools and basic forms were incredibly easy to use, and there were very good tutorials for everything else. LibreOffice Base is different and not even close in comprehensiveness, and there seems to be nothing replacing it that isn't a super expensive SaaS.

maybe SqlServer Express ? It has limits on memory and DB size, but if your project is small it might suffice, in conjunction with Management Studio Express. I've never used Access so apologies if you're looking for more than a GUI-driven interface to the DB.

SQL Server Express is just a (fairly generous, last I looked!) limited version of the full SQL Server.

So, it's a substitute in terms of affordability. But absolutely not in terms of "rapid GUI application development" for the non-programmer.

Re: Ask HN: Why did Visual Basic die?

#278

Post by emodendroket »

viraptor wrote: post #255
RyLuke wrote: post #200

I actually wrote a long article on this [1]—and had a chance to interview some of the team that built the original version of VB that was sold to Microsoft. (Alan Cooper and Michael Geary; Michael actually frequents HN pretty regularly!) My opinion is that it was a confluence of a few factors: - Microsoft was very worried about the threat of Java/Sun, and rotated hard into .NET and the common language runtime as a re…

> VB got a full rewrite into an object-oriented language and the IDE moved further away from the VB6 visual building paradigm. What do you mean by this? Visual Studio today has a designer / code editor that works in a very similar way to VB6 that I remember. What do you think is missing?

A lot of people who wrote VB weren’t serious/professional programmers and VB.NET was too complex for them. For the serious programmer group, the stink of “VB” tainted it right out of the gate (despite having complete feature parity for a long time VB.NET jobs always paid notably less than C# ones). So it was kind of a compromise that satisfied nobody.

Re: Ask HN: Why did Visual Basic die?

#279

Post by mattgreenrocks »

davidmurdoch wrote: post #181
aj7 wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This post has more information than you realize.

What do you mean? Are you suggesting you can figure out who the company is?

I have a guess, but don’t want to offend the big cheese there so I’ll just see how this plays out.

Re: Ask HN: Why did Visual Basic die?

#280

Post by jpadkins »

eternityforest wrote: post #158
nottheengineer wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Excel is literally 2D programming. Us mortal developers who can only put lines below one another are incapable of comprehending it, so we only get to ask the wise finance people how their enigma works. On a serious note, I dread excel. If your PC is set to german, excel will translate the VBA keywords to german. But if you want to type them, you have to do that in english and then have excel translate them. I don't w…

The 2D aspect is the part of Excel I don't understand. Why does it have to be a grid? It's great for laying out things meant to print, and making invoices and stuff... But why didn't we have code files and proper fixed layout DB-style tables as "pages" that can go in a workbook? Maybe keeping everything as 2D as possible is a necessary compromise for the spatial thinkers out there, and they just wouldn't want it if i…

> Why does it have to be a grid?

Because we have been doing it that way for almost 4,000 years!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spreadsheet#History

Humans have organized data into tables, that is, grids of columns and rows, since ancient times. The Babylonians used clay tablets to store data as far back as 1800 BCE.[16] Other examples can be found in book-keeping ledgers and astronomical records.[17]

Since at least 1906 the term "spread sheet" has been used in accounting to mean a grid of columns and rows

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