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Microsoft plots the end of Visual Basic

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Re: Microsoft plots the end of Visual Basic

#201

Post by cm2187 »

Exmoor wrote: post #41
UnoriginalGuy wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The two are completely district languages. Kind of like comparing Java with JavaScript. I'm sure in general Microsoft would love to scrap VB in Excel but there's too many companies that run entire areas of business on it, or the whole business itself. It is the typical legacy/back compat problem. Python or even Powershell would be a vast improvement, but you're going against billions in sunk cost/skills/knowledge. VB…

Would it be impossible for Excel to allow coding in multiple languages? I totally get that there's a huge (disturbing) amount of business critical stuff using the current scripts, but they really should move on to something more modern.

Microsoft pretty much built it (would allow any .net language to behave like VBA, with an integrated IDE and ability to save code inside the document). Then they killed it. I think that was a huge mistake from a productivity point of view, and also to get a fighting chance to retire VB6.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Visual_Studio_Tools_for_Applic...

Re: Microsoft plots the end of Visual Basic

#202

Post by cm2187 »

sytelus wrote: post #131

It's coincidental to have this announcement come on the same day Bill Gates announced he is resigning from the Microsoft board (I'm sure completely unrelated). Microsoft was founded on the idea of writing Basic interpreter by Gates so a legacy of 45 years from both has ended today.

Microsoft pretty much annonced the would treat VB.net as legacy 2/3 years ago. This is just Thurott realising it now.

Re: Microsoft plots the end of Visual Basic

#203

Post by pjmlp »

nekeo9jd wrote: post #161
ryanmarsh wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A whole lot of us got into programming as kids because of VB. What do young people have today like it?

No wonder so many programmers stick to boring business apps! ;-) I got into coding qbasic (meh) & amiga (yeaaah) game engines in the 80s. Currently teaching kids with Computercraft, to manipulate virtual worlds rather than boring spreadsheets. IMO that sort of computer work will be obsolete by the time today’s kid are grown. I’d probably avoid more than basic coding in general anymore and focus on math-y stuff. Just…

I got into coding via Timex 2068 Basic, Z80/8086/68000 Assembly, Turbo Basic/Turbo Pascal Demoscene meetups.

Maybe coding the Arduino/ESP32 game boy clones is appealing to today's kids.

Re: Microsoft plots the end of Visual Basic

#204

Post by polotics »

bluedino wrote: post #128
pfarrell wrote: post #83

VB was a great and successful language. It empowered a lot of departments to create bespoke programs that, while not having been built on solid comp sci principles, were good enough and solved real business problems without having to involve the IT department. That’s a strength and a weakness.

VB is one of those things that let the determined create useful things. Not unlike Microsoft Access. Instead of actually learning principles and practices, and a 'good' language, they could just hack something together than managed to just barely work, armed with a $99 copy of Visual Basic and a 'Teach Yourself VB in 21 Days' books from SAMS publishing. And by the time they knew any better, they were up to their ears…

Do you have any hard evidence of an actual causation between VB and the symptoms you describe? I think any non-bleeding-edge mid and later hype-cycle technology will have its monsters. I get the feeling VB is past all that, and what's leftovers can't be sooo disfunctional.

Re: Microsoft plots the end of Visual Basic

#205

Post by polotics »

encoderer wrote: post #84
rkagerer wrote: post #6

I loved VB6. Of all the languages and IDE's I've ever used, I've never been more efficient in any other one. As long as MS doesn't break my workarounds to run that old IDE or its EXE's, I'm happy. VB.NET was a great stepping stone, but after switching to C# I never looked back. The only thing I miss is global functions that don't need a class qualifier in front of them. And I still find the Edit-and-Continue debuggin…

My kingdom for the VB6 time traveling debugger in every language.

Exactly! Behind all the churn of new newer newest rehashes of what a programming ecosystem could be hide real hard problems, and they mostly never get addressed.

Re: Microsoft plots the end of Visual Basic

#206

Post by mrighele »

hermitdev wrote: post #129
zozbot234 wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

GOTO for flow control is not that bad, it's just a tail call after all. The real damage is things like having everything be global variables. But part of that was a technical limitation, as things like "proper" call stacks and reentrant code as the default still had plenty of overhead, and even FORTRAN didn't support them.

Goto has its place. It's not evil, but should be used judiciously. After all, C family constructs such as break, continue are glorified/specialized, albeit scoped and unlabelled gotos. One of the places I like gotos is when I need to break out of a nested loop. A goto to outside of the outer loop is far more obvious than a flag and a conditional to break from the parent nested loop. It also generates better machine c…

The issue was not the presence of goto itself, but the fact that is was one of the main tools for flow control, while as you say it should be used sparingly.

It is like having an army of soldiers armed with a David Crockett[1] instead of a regular rifle. Things may get ugly fast.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Davy_Crockett_(nuclear_devic...

Re: Microsoft plots the end of Visual Basic

#207

Post by int_19h »

trent_lott wrote: post #91
kjaftaedi wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I used to think this too, but everything you can do in VB6 you can do in powershell, and do it better. Try/Catch, windows forms.. literally anything you can think of. You can even mix powershell and C# together in the same script. Once I realized I had a better version of everything I wanted, it became my new favorite.

Quickly and easily design and make a GUI program with n real training? VB6 got me into programming as a kid. I mostly use python for stats stuff. I sorta understand how to run up a GUI using tkinter, but it seems like a huge pain in the ass. I'm sure Visual Studio offers the ability to do whatever VB6 could with a GUI, but it isn't obvious how to get there. VB6 was one nice thing - build 'a program' as you understand…

> Quickly and easily design and make a GUI program with n real training

If you're starting from scratch, VB.NET is not really any harder to use for this purpose than VB6.

Re: Microsoft plots the end of Visual Basic

#208

Post by int_19h »

stcredzero wrote: post #79
rkagerer wrote: post #6

I loved VB6. Of all the languages and IDE's I've ever used, I've never been more efficient in any other one. As long as MS doesn't break my workarounds to run that old IDE or its EXE's, I'm happy. VB.NET was a great stepping stone, but after switching to C# I never looked back. The only thing I miss is global functions that don't need a class qualifier in front of them. And I still find the Edit-and-Continue debuggin…

> I loved VB6. Of all the languages and IDE's I've ever used, I've never been more efficient in any other one. Other than the amount of work it would take, what's to keep someone from taking all of the specs and docs, and implementing a language compatible with VB6 and VB.NET?

For one thing, there was no VB6 language spec, and the docs were rather informal when it comes to syntax definition (which is very non-trivial - all the "special" functions etc).

Re: Microsoft plots the end of Visual Basic

#209

Post by laumars »

badsectoracula wrote: post #117
zozbot234 wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

GOTO for flow control is not that bad, it's just a tail call after all. The real damage is things like having everything be global variables. But part of that was a technical limitation, as things like "proper" call stacks and reentrant code as the default still had plenty of overhead, and even FORTRAN didn't support them.

I'm not sure what you have in mind but in the 1975 dialects of BASIC the code was something like 10 REM Grab input 20 GOSUB 1000 30 IF VALUE=BAR THEN GOTO 100 40 IF VALUE=BAZ THEN GOTO 200 50 IF VALUE=BLA THEN GOTO 300 60 GOTO 20 100 REM Bar stuff 110 blahblah 199 RESUME 200 REM Baz stuff 210 blahblah 299 RESUME 300 REM Bla stuff 310 blahblah 399 RESUME 1000 REM Code that grabs input 1010 blahblah 1100 RESUME Or just…

I don't think that example you've posted is right (the grab input one, not the game on Github).

Firstly, RESUME was to continue execution after an error (eg ON ERROR RESUME NEXT). I think RETURN is what you might have meant?

Secondly, you cannot RESUME/RETURN from a GOTO. I think you meant GOSUB; which was a crude approximation of subroutines. BASIC did also have GOTO as well though.

Re: Microsoft plots the end of Visual Basic

#210

Post by tastroder »

hermitdev wrote: post #103
mysterydip wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Definitely. I was a huge fan of VB6, spent thousands of hours writing all kinds of things. When I first heard of VB.NET, I was excited to see what new features were implemented, expecting something like VB4->VB5->VB6. Boy was I in for a surprise. It seemed more like C wrapped in VB syntax. I started looking to other languages at that point, but as some other posters said I never found anything quite able to match the…

I never did VB6 or VB.Net, but I've done VBscript with classic ASP and VBA in Excel. Glad I went with C# instead of VB.Net. Not trashing VB, but C# was always more capable and fully featured than VB (VB couldnt even do unsigned integers, and I dont it can even now), and almost immediately more widely adopted in even .Net 1.0. Hell, C++ with COM was more capable (if not extremely annoying amd error prone). Of course V…

Thing is, it was never about language capability. VB6 with COM was still faster in terms of development cycles for people used to the woes back then. Though I'd argue that the few differences there were between VBScript/VBA and VB6 made it much more capable from a development perspective back then... Most of my VB6 bubble moved to VB.Net during the transition, the widespread move to C# with those folks came years later when it became somewhat inevitable. After all, for the typical type of application, language is honestly mostly irrelevant as long as it does not get in your way.

All this feels a little like history repeating itself. We even naively made up a petition back then to keep VB6 around, somewhat glad that led nowhere in retrospect. A few decades ago I loved that the VB ecosystem was approachable and combined beginners and professional users. I somewhat think we have enough other good tools that fit this description these days, some of which incidentally even come with a good programming language.

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