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Ask HN: Why did Visual Basic die?

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Re: Ask HN: Why did Visual Basic die?

#411

Post by pmontra »

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.

Check Filemaker. A friend of mine is a 100% Filemaker freelance. Apparently it can also generate web sites over the data in its db.

Re: Ask HN: Why did Visual Basic die?

#412

Post by lelanthran »

cstejerean wrote: post #343
SamuelAdams wrote: post #309

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think today python fills that void - people who are not serious programmers but need to put something together. Think academics, data analysts, etc. And since Python is cross platform and easy to get started with it is a lot more attractive than VB.

It's significantly harder to put together a quick GUI application in Python than it used to be in the VB6 days. Just getting all the dependencies installed can be a pain, and then good luck trying to add another button to that app say 2 years later, chances are nothing will build anymore.

> It's significantly harder to put together a quick GUI application in Python than it used to be in the VB6 days. Just getting all the dependencies installed can be a pain, and then good luck trying to add another button to that app say 2 years later, chances are nothing will build anymore.

I would say that it is harder, but not significantly so.

Lazarus gets mentioned a lot on these forums, but have you tried it? I use it to whack together decent native looking applications.

It's a single download, it comes with a comprehensive list of components which you drag onto a form to build the GUI, never breaks old apps on an update, and works on Windows, Mac and Linux.

Re: Ask HN: Why did Visual Basic die?

#415

Post by dkga »

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…

As someone who loved coding in VB6: (I actually dreamt about it the other night, thought I woke up some 20 yrs ago!)

- very cool that you got to interview the VB team, your article is high on my reading list :) - to OP’s point, I recently started doing some things in Swift with XCode and found sim having just as much fun. I’m using SwiftUI. So maybe not the same experience for everyone but I wanted to share here.

Re: Ask HN: Why did Visual Basic die?

#416

Post by fendy3002 »

marcus_holmes wrote: post #407
yoava wrote: post #403

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 properti…

can vouch on this, since originally I really prefer WYSIWYG UI (VB, C# winforms, wpf) over web early. However security-wise it's hard to enforce when using them, since they don't really operating using client-server by default, having your backend logic prone to be reverse engineered.

This doesn't happen in web apps, since backend logic stays on the server. Whipping a html UI over the already server-client architecture is easier. In addition with ease of deployment of application making web apps very favorable.

Re: Ask HN: Why did Visual Basic die?

#417

Post by Qwertious »

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.

I have a theory on why: it's because the scope of a general-purpose-ish language inherently increases; there are always users that are mostly covered by the featureset, who just need one more feature and they'll be fully covered, so they'll ask for that feature. But by satisfying them, you'll bring more non-users from their nowhere-near-covered position up to the "99%-covered" boundary, and then they'll want their own last-1% feature.

The same people who want simplicity in their language/tooling also want to not learn a second almost-identical system just to achieve that last 1%, so refusing to expand your scope here isn't necessarily "optimizing for simplicity".

Re: Ask HN: Why did Visual Basic die?

#418

Post by kalleboo »

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.

I think there's a deeper problem with development tools in general:

There is no tool that goes from 0 to 100.

The tools you listed (I'd also add Excel) were great for people starting out, people who had an itch to scratch, people solving a problem. But inevitably, the programs they made worked too well, they got adopted, got added features, became mission-critical, and now outgrow the tool they were written in. And that's when you get the "nerds asking for complexity". Those people didn't start out nerds, they started out as users solving a problem, but now their little "make a formatted report out of this Excel sheet" tool is running the whole companies realtime sales forecasting and they scaled up along with the project.

I think the plan with VB.NET was that ("start out with VB and if you need it you can seamlessly graduate to C#!"), and Chris Lattner planned the same thing with Swift ("it will replace Python!") but none of those plans were ever carried out properly.

Re: Ask HN: Why did Visual Basic die?

#419

Post by fodkodrasz »

jamra wrote: post #357
radicalbyte wrote: post #217

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The web and the way MS handle the web killed it. Microsoft was pushing everyone towards these horrible activx components. Many moved to PHP or Adobe Flash. I was using MS Access back in the day to solve business problems - it was like a VB6 DSL focused fully on data-driven applications. It was extremely time efficient thanks to that focus - what took me days to build took a VB developer (or PHP developer) months. Tha…

In my experience, ActiveX was not what they pushed. They pushed Asp.Net Webforms which used VBScript for the template language. The ViewState monstrosity made it an awful experience. Specifically how it send way more data than needed to and from the server on each request. I shiver when I think of it.

The real problem was worse than that: it was not a technical, but a legal one: Licensing!

You need to buy CALs for every concurrent user (yes, not only SMB/terminal services users) was the way to go according to some MS license experts, and the licensing was totally incomprehensible, as is today. No wonder most didn't want to risk building a business on these maybe not so solid foundations.

Still I only dare using asp.net for serving public webpages from Linux.

Of course the technical problems were also present, but many didn't even get to think of that as the BSA bullying was keeping them away already.

Re: Ask HN: Why did Visual Basic die?

#420

Post by SuperHeavy256 »

meredydd wrote: post #120
_f1dq wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can write HTML/CSS/JS and a few back-end languages like PHP in my sleep but there's no way I could hand-code a web app as fast as I could a desktop app in 1997 using VB. I would LOVE it if I could, though.

Have you tried https://anvil.works ? (I'm a founder!) It's quite explicitly VB-esque (only using Python), and having a single paradigm rather than stitching together several different programs speeds things up even for those who can write HTML/JS/CSS in their sleep. (And of course, you can drop out to JS/CSS/HTML if you want.) Overall I think the development speed is comparable to VB6.

I tried it out and followed the entire tutorial, but the compulsory 'anvil' branding on every free published app kinda killed it for me.

VB never had that.

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