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Ask HN: Why did Visual Basic die?

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Re: Ask HN: Why did Visual Basic die?

#401

Post by quickthrower2 »

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 wonder how doable it would be to make a drag drop interface for building react complete with double click to add click handler and focus on that new code kinda stuff.

Re: Ask HN: Why did Visual Basic die?

#402

Post by olvy0 »

mamcx wrote: post #337
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.

> what is a good alternative to Access (or Fox, I add) Nothing. Access is(was) in fact a worse alternative to Fox: - Much worse DB engine, and that is saying a lot (FoxPro db can and get corrupted. A typical functionality that was added to any fox codebase was a utility to fix it) - MUCH MUCH worse programming language (VB) that is neither good as-is, much less as a data-programing language. Fox/dbase is the only dat…

As someone who loves LINQ, this is really cool, best of luck with your language! There is certainly a void that is waiting to be filled by such a language.

Although as other said on this thread, the real killer feature would be a form builder as in foxpro etc. It can be somewhat primitive, as long as it's easy to build and extend. Ideally the forms should be web based.

Re: Ask HN: Why did Visual Basic die?

#403

Post by yoava »

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…

I do not think the problem with VB was the language. I think it was the graphic / UI expressive power, a simple way to add and create custom components.

At the same time that both VB and Delphi reached peak usage, the web started to show how easy it is to express graphically and UI using CSS. When you have to write tons of lines of code in VB to get to the same as 3 lines of CSS...

Re: Ask HN: Why did Visual Basic die?

#404

Post by hnaccountme »

VB was mostly for IT departments to create small custom apps without having the full software engineering skill set. This was the time when software development started to be outsourced to the 3rd world. Most of the low level apps that were maintained in a companies IT department would have been outsourced easily. But the companies taking on these projects in the 3rd world would have used more complex development tools just to look and feel like they are doing complex work.

I do not mean to suggest there are no complex software coming out from the 3rd world. But most of the outsourced projects are simple CRUD applications

Re: Ask HN: Why did Visual Basic die?

#405

Post by yoava »

in one word - CSS.

CSS has killed VB.

How? when you need to build any application with custom graphics or UX, in VB you are gonna writes tons of lines of code, while using CSS you just write 2-3 declarations.

Re: Ask HN: Why did Visual Basic die?

#406

Post by mamcx »

olvy0 wrote: post #402
mamcx wrote: post #337

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> what is a good alternative to Access (or Fox, I add) Nothing. Access is(was) in fact a worse alternative to Fox: - Much worse DB engine, and that is saying a lot (FoxPro db can and get corrupted. A typical functionality that was added to any fox codebase was a utility to fix it) - MUCH MUCH worse programming language (VB) that is neither good as-is, much less as a data-programing language. Fox/dbase is the only dat…

As someone who loves LINQ, this is really cool, best of luck with your language! There is certainly a void that is waiting to be filled by such a language. Although as other said on this thread, the real killer feature would be a form builder as in foxpro etc. It can be somewhat primitive, as long as it's easy to build and extend. Ideally the forms should be web based.

Sure, the UI side is pretty important!

But I try to get a good companion for it, so it get good synergy.

Re: Ask HN: Why did Visual Basic die?

#407

Post by marcus_holmes »

yoava wrote: post #403
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…

I do not think the problem with VB was the language. I think it was the graphic / UI expressive power, a simple way to add and create custom components. At the same time that both VB and Delphi reached peak usage, the web started to show how easy it is to express graphically and UI using CSS. When you have to write tons of lines of code in VB to get to the same as 3 lines of CSS...

This doesn't match my experience, if anything the other way around.

CSS back then was a lot harder than it is now. There's still memes around this, but even something as common as centering an item with CSS was not trivial at all. Now we have flex and it's easy, but back then it was very much not.

VB didn't work on the same paradigm - it was a more WYSIWYG environment. You drew a button on the form, set some properties in the sidepanel, and that's that. Notably there are zero lines of code involved in this, so the whole "you have to write tons of lines of code in VB" is simply not true. Possibly you're thinking of its successor, XAML, for which this is true.

Re: Ask HN: Why did Visual Basic die?

#408

Post by seanmcdirmid »

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…

My understanding is that the target audience for VB.net was happy enough with C# instead, so it was a product without much of a user base.

Re: Ask HN: Why did Visual Basic die?

#409

Post by glenngillen »

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.

An unfortunate byproduct of this, that I think is an unpopular opinion in these parts, is increased in product analytics/telemetry. People eventually learn that the feedback you receive re your product only rarely reflects the experience of the majority of users.

Re: Ask HN: Why did Visual Basic die?

#410

Post by marcus_holmes »

I remember it as the push to C#. Microsoft had basically shat themselves about Java, and were pushing C# as its rival. VB.Net was a bit broken, there was lots of "you'll have to use the C# interface for that because the VB one isn't ready yet". Generally as developers we were pushed to C# and the writing was clearly on the wall that VB wasn't going to continue as is. The whole Microsoft stack was converging on C# and moving away from VB.

And the replacement of COM with .Net has an impact. We had a whole ecosystem of COM (and DCOM) objects that worked well. .Net broke all of that, and didn't replace them for years.

I don't think it was the move to OOP. VB4 introduced classes way back in '96 (iirc), and by VB6 everything was objects. It was a little more complicated for newbies (I remember training junior devs in OOP in the early '00s), but once they got the hang of classes and instances it was plain sailing.

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