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Ask HN: Why did Visual Basic die?

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Re: Ask HN: Why did Visual Basic die?

#391

Post by postalrat »

ulope wrote: post #371
dahwolf wrote: post #164

Not just VB, but also things like Borland Delphi. 25 years ago, you could visually compose a UI using standardized components, including advanced concepts like a layout manager. You could do data-binding visually by navigating a linked database. You can write logic/events just by double-clicking a button and the event is created. Here you'd write your code which would typically be pretty easy because all contextual o…

And everything looked like the same unusable mess with 25 nested tab groups and tree views

Do you have an example screenshots of what you are talking about?

Re: Ask HN: Why did Visual Basic die?

#392

Post by antod »

rathboma wrote: post #147
dghlsakjg wrote: post #30

I think for a lot of purposes, the internet kind of took over. VB was great if you needed to do something limited to a single machine. These days, we want data to be available across machines which requires using a network, and the default network is the internet. If I'm going to be using the internet anyway, I can knock up something in HTML + JS + firebase/whatever data store, and have an application that works on a…

Does no-one remember VBScript and Active Server Pages (ASP). It was Visual basic as a server-side language, positioned to challenge PHP. VB made it to the web :-)

I doubt MS was even aware of PHP 1.x when they released ASP back in 1996. Hardly anyone else was aware of PHP before 3.x either.

By the time I found it, PHP 3.x/4.x was such an improvement over classic ASP / VBScript, that I think MS would've done a better job if it was positioned to challenge PHP :)

Re: Ask HN: Why did Visual Basic die?

#393

Post by antod »

SoftTalker wrote: post #179
rathboma wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Does no-one remember VBScript and Active Server Pages (ASP). It was Visual basic as a server-side language, positioned to challenge PHP. VB made it to the web :-)

Oh yes. And VBscript in the browser as well (as long as it was IE). One of their attempts at browser "lock-in"

If you installed ActivePerl or ActivePython (remember those?), IE would also let you use them in the browser too with Active Scripting. It was an ActiveX thing, so only for IE.

Re: Ask HN: Why did Visual Basic die?

#394

Post by gremlinunderway »

bonzini wrote: post #154
mamcx wrote: post #134

The reason is even bigger than just VB. MS at the time just decide to fully kill the "enthusiast" developer and the "single/truly small" team developer. This is mostly covered under the "RAD" umbrella. It kills VB, FoxPro, and now more evidently, Access (more like let it slowly die). .NET + Visual Studio + Sql Server are not a substitute in this market. Them are for "professional developer"/"a small cog in a big mach…

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.

Budibase looks really impressive, basically a GUI frontend builder for postgres and its open source. Haven't actually deployed it, but played with the GUI builder and its nice.

There's a few other similar ones out there too like Baserow [2], Appsmith [3] and nocodb [4].

Finally, if you wanted a step up, then I guess supabase [5] would be the next one up but its more like "I just want to write front end and have auth, database, API and storage taken care of for me"

But none of these really give you that all-in-one database and front-end via files like Access did and its a damn shame. Yeah I know Access lead to some god-awful applications, but honestly the people complaining about shadow IT don't realize that its inevitable if IT isn't fixing people's problems. You just need to be clear that if the business unit goes down that path, they're on their own. So if the guy who built your crazy Excel VBA app is gone, don't expect that to be picked up by others just because its super important. But, if it is in fact that important, then its probably a prime candidate for actual development work, so the duct-taped together things do end up being sort of testbeds for whats actually important.

The whole lowcode-nocode shtick is a bit oversold, but one good aspect of it is that if you allow for an easy onboarding sandbox for the type of person who would otherwise make an Excel VBA app, at least some of these platforms have sandboxes with guardrails and other compliance stuff you can apply.

[1] https://budibase.com/ [2] https://baserow.io/ [3] https://www.appsmith.com/ [4] https://github.com/nocodb/nocodb [5] https://supabase.com/

Re: Ask HN: Why did Visual Basic die?

#395

Post by quickthrower2 »

tombert wrote: post #237
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…

I have grown a respect for Excel in the last decade or so. It's slow, it's clunky, and it's far from perfect, but I think it's among the most approachable language out there. A lot of people using Excel, even some of the more advanced stuff like if statements and logic, don't even realize that they're writing programs, and I think that's genuinely awesome: people are able to utilize the power of programming by accide…

I find a spreadsheet (Google Sheets will do) is a great thinking tool. Any thinking will involve probably some maths and some tables. Excel is built for both.

Re: Ask HN: Why did Visual Basic die?

#396

Post by quickthrower2 »

eastern wrote: post #366
wiz21c wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Us mortal developers who can only put lines below one another At least my spaghetti code goes into one direction only...

Yes, but I bet your code cannot reveal its own spaghetti:-) Excel has long had an option to display 'precedent' and 'dependent' cells. You can actually see the spaghetti right there. https://support.microsoft.com/en-au/office/display-the-relat...

Now do that for the VBA!

Re: Ask HN: Why did Visual Basic die?

#397

Post by quickthrower2 »

trimethylpurine wrote: post #340
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…

I can't understand why so many finance people won't just learn SQL.

SQL is not a replacement for Excel.

Re: Ask HN: Why did Visual Basic die?

#398

Post by antupis »

ksec wrote: post #351
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…

>The most vocal, but minority of VB users wanted more advanced functionality and a more powerful/expressive language (as is often the case). This is the single reason why most computing tools, ( not limited to VB ) never reached wide enough audience. The nerds keep asking for complexity, but the majority actually wanted even more simplicity. HyperCard, Delphi, VB6, Flash.

Adding features to a popular tool later can make it messy. Building a tool where you can add features easily makes it elegant eg Lisp.

Re: Ask HN: Why did Visual Basic die?

#399

Post by philistine »

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…

Everybody who replies to you, I think, has gotten it wrong. What you're asking is not why any grid, but why an infinite un-malleable grid.

What you want is the paradigm of Numbers from Apple. Their office suite is good, and it has the benefit of being opinionated. They're not trying to ape Microsoft, like all the open-source projects.

Re: Ask HN: Why did Visual Basic die?

#400

Post by pillefitz »

harry8 wrote: post #356
pillefitz wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And it's often the best tool for the job

Other than the known calculation bugs in excel that MS refused to fix for at least a decade and probably still 20 years later. http://www.pages.drexel.edu/~bdm25/gnumeric.pdf http://www.phusewiki.org/docs/2009%20PAPERS/SP06.pdf http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1198/tas.2011.09076

Only last link works
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