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Ask HN: Why did Visual Basic die?

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Re: Ask HN: Why did Visual Basic die?

#441

Post by 3np »

wkat4242 wrote: post #435
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.net was a bit weird yes but visual basic did need work. Vb6 did not have multithreading which was really starting to hurt its efficacy by 2002. You could work around it by using events as much as possible but there were still some things that were blocking. Also the events were not even on a separate thread either leading to the need to pepper DoEvents everywhere. This was a dealbreaker for vb to ever become a ser…

Electron seems successful regardless of lack of multithreading on the language level?

I don't buy this one.

Re: Ask HN: Why did Visual Basic die?

#442

Post by Matumio »

yc-kraln wrote: post #212
JackMorgan wrote: post #193

The productivity wasn't really that good. Rose tinted glasses. All the VB apps I've seen (and still get paid to maintain/rewrite to this day in the finance world) are an order of magnitude simpler than even a simple modern website. They often only have a few users, no devops automation, no deployment automation, terrible logging, terrible instrumentation, no tests, unacceptable access control, tons of failure edge ca…

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.

> You are gatekeeping with strawmen.

Love the image. "Hey you! No visual aids go into this town! One more step, and my strawmen will React!" But the accountant with the abacus continued towards the east gate. He squeezed between two strawmen, who didn't React as much as the gatekeeper was implying.

Re: Ask HN: Why did Visual Basic die?

#443

Post by ShadowBanThis01 »

highwaylights wrote: post #283
viraptor wrote: post #255

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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?

How much time do you have? P-code debugging with fully rewindable edit and continue. A one-true-way event model that was derided at the time but was really just years ahead of its time. Minimal runtime downloads to install apps locally, which also produced tiny, performant executables. The sweet, sweet With keyword. I know, I know. But I don’t care. Just be more aware of your namespaces. Also (and I still don’t under…

One thing that sucks about those combos, if I remember correctly: Don’t they show only the members of the class your cursor happens to be sitting in, and not those in the whole file? That’s just monumentally dumb. I remember cursing at those as I hunted through a bunch of files for some function… only to find it was right there in the file I had up but Microsoft didn’t show it.

I remember scorning Xcode back when it was Project Builder, but saying Hey, at least its drop-down member lists work properly.

Re: Ask HN: Why did Visual Basic die?

#444

Post by piperswe »

mike_d wrote: post #185
nvy wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Equally serious question: what is the use case for Access? It's been installed on every corp workstation I've had and it's never been useful. In my experience either Excel can do it or you need a real programming language/database.

Access was an app you had installed on your workstation but never opened because in the backend every late 90s early 2000s desktop app was using it as its data backend. Between Excel (with no functional API to use for storage) and a "real database" (your users now need to ask IT to deploy SQLServer) was a use case of app just needs to store persistent data for a single user.

So basically the SQLite of its day?

Re: Ask HN: Why did Visual Basic die?

#445

Post by phs318u »

xet7 wrote: post #387
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: a) https://www.nubuilder.com b) https://gambas.sourceforge.net/en/main.html

Also:

c) https://github.com/twinbasic/twinbasic

Once it gets out of beta.

Re: Ask HN: Why did Visual Basic die?

#446

Post by deostroll »

The language died because of Microsoft tried to woo java developers into using the .net ecosystem. So whenever the CLR got more features, C# (rather than VB) started supporting them more readily. Experience wise, it looked more elegant in c# than in vb.

VB originally wasn't thought of as an OOP language. But through vb.net when that paradigm was "imported", the language lost its charm.

Further more, web development took flight. No one was interested to build desktop applications anymore.

Also I wouldn't say the influx of java developers into the .net ecosystem was that considerable. (Or for that matter other platform developers like python, delphi). It was definitely slow during the 2002s. Because the java ecosystem had achieved code-once-and-run-any-where paradigm. You could write desktop applications developed on windows, on, linux machines. From a business POV why would application developers "want" a different ecosystem to achieve this?

All this sort of eventually killed classic VB.

PS: you should also ask bing ai this question. :)

Re: Ask HN: Why did Visual Basic die?

#448

Post by ablackhole »

I'm only half way thru one good post after another. But I don't see many posts about: can VB be extended, expanded, developed? Truly, I am far behind most, and currently I am working on an app, in Excel, that helps the voiceless (like me), speak. I worked w/ Access VB for a short while, but, it, at the very least, needs Sql Server. Also, there are issues with threading, but is that the end of it? Since VB is a high level environment, speed is an issue. I have not yet heard that Excel is really headed toward .net or any other framework, but I keep checking. If anyone at MS wants to appologize for the Ribbon, don't bother. I will never accept! But can VB, in some way, be fixed or rehabilitated or improved, or whatever? I do hope so, but I can be persuaded otherwise.

Re: Ask HN: Why did Visual Basic die?

#449

Post by oliwarner »

radicalbyte wrote: post #217
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 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…

I have the opposite take, as a non-native programmer in the early 00s.

All the PostBack loops in ASP.Net and WYSIWYG editing in VS.Net 2003+ felt like they were trying to appease native programmers to a fault. VB.Net wasn't bad but it was frustrating how hard it was just to script something without boilerplate. Being limited to IIS was also bunk.

Re: Ask HN: Why did Visual Basic die?

#450

Post by marcus_holmes »

yoava wrote: post #423
marcus_holmes wrote: post #407

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Having worked for 10 years on both Delphi and VS, I understand the experience you are talking about. Having the ability to draw UI is amazing, and super productive. For business applications, it is amazing. However, I still remember at around 2002 that we where asked to build specific custom user experiences, I think it was around reports, and using VB or Delphi was a lot of programming using draw commands... while u…

Reports, yes, that was a pain in the arse. Anything where you had to generate controls on the fly based on data was painful. Crystal Reports was both a nightmare and a lifesaver at the same time. I always thought that someone should do a better job of it, but I did not want to go there ;) By comparison producing a report (or anything data-generated for that matter) in HTML was easy.
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