521–530 of 535 posts
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.
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> The problem was, nobody was willing to claim ownership. The business guy who wrote it was long gone, and IT would not accept an Access app. If the business relies upon that Access app, and IT refuses to accept it, then it's a failure of IT to accept it and then replace it. IT exists to serve the business.
OK but does IT exist to serve the business by accepting responsibility for stuff that doesn’t meet their standards and they can’t really support? Why have qualified people at all then?
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What's the bottleneck to build a modern VB6? Just curious.
The people most interested in such a product are not those with the skills to build it.
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Why would it be a 'nightmare' if they recorded everything down and understand their software, what it does, what it doesn't do, how it operates, etc.?
Database corruption, unexpected bugs, inability to account for new desired behaviors… have you worked on software before?
e.g. 'inability to account for new desired behaviors' for presumably a core business system, that the business relies on, would almost certainly imply that.
As to your question, it doesn't really matter what my background is, I could be a ballet dancer and would still be able to reason out how businesses operate and how software historically has integrated. It's not some big secret.
C#/WinForms is the spiritual successor to VB. Even better than VB6.
The whole dot paradigm took a group of people who were very comfortable with a language and tried to turn their brains inside out. Ex: x.ToString doesn't have the same intuitive recognition as Str(x), nor can Str(x) be as easily muddled together with 3 other methods. Call it simple and meaningless, but .NET is profuse with these turnarounds, and they required people to re-learn everything, even the simple stuff. .NET adds layers of complexity by enabling super-spiffy compact writing of multiple operations with complex operators all on the same line that is far too easy to get lost in and that frankly, is unnecessary. I'm talking about things like delegates, lambda expressions, extension methods, and async/await. These are cute if you're super nerdy, but for most of the rest of the world they take something that was easy to use and contort it into an unrecognizable mess.
VB6 was just complex enough and graphics-centered and they moved it to a hugely overly complex and language-centered model. It made no sense to me. Of course, everyone who thought "real" programming should be harder embraced C# like it was manna from God, and this by and large is the thinking that killed VB6. It was a complete paradigm shift in the wrong direction for visual thinkers.
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…
You might need slightly more technical knowledge, but not so much that you can't have a simple CRUD app running in a day or so of work. Well that’s quite a professional bubble you live in. Web dev is truly a frog in a boiling water. If my VB/Delphi/Access/PIC buddy who made various apps and hardware back in the day asked me for a platform and I advised him to use what HN praises as “simple”, then pretty sure he’ll ne…
Along with the rise of complexity in tooling, the data has risen in complexity and quantity, as well as the importance of getting it right.
Back then, a dentist, lets say, could get by with a cobbled together VB program for patient scheduling and CRM. Now patients and doctors expect a system that manages digital records in a HIPAA compliant way, can text message reminders to the patients, allows self service on the web, and automatically submits billing details to insurance. Plus, it should be pretty, with all sorts of cute animations!
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> 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.
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You might need slightly more technical knowledge, but not so much that you can't have a simple CRUD app running in a day or so of work. Well that’s quite a professional bubble you live in. Web dev is truly a frog in a boiling water. If my VB/Delphi/Access/PIC buddy who made various apps and hardware back in the day asked me for a platform and I advised him to use what HN praises as “simple”, then pretty sure he’ll ne…
I said the app was simple, not the stack. Along with the rise of complexity in tooling, the data has risen in complexity and quantity, as well as the importance of getting it right. Back then, a dentist, lets say, could get by with a cobbled together VB program for patient scheduling and CRM. Now patients and doctors expect a system that manages digital records in a HIPAA compliant way, can text message reminders to…