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Microsoft plots the end of Visual Basic
241–250 of 292 posts
Re: Microsoft plots the end of Visual Basic
#242Earlier quoted context omitted.
Is it widespread? I've never seen anyone else using powershell 'in the wild', admittedly for the last 3 years I've mainly worked alone, but I still see people using CMD scripts. I usually get frustrated with it and bash out a quick cmdlet instead.
sysadmins who are fully invested in the MS ecosystem do use it a lot. People doing cross-platform work, don’t. In terms of wider adoption, it suffered by maturing at a time when a lot of people had moved on to more powerful devop solutions. And of course, being MS tech (although technically it was acquired), it carries a stigma. I just found it un-intuitive, ugly, and verbose. Compared to my beloved python it looks r…
I don't believe PowerShell was 'acquired' - it was built in house. I can recall reading the MSDN blog posts about its development way back when.
Re: Microsoft plots the end of Visual Basic
#243Nothing nostalgic about this for me. Good. Riddance.
Re: Microsoft plots the end of Visual Basic
#244Earlier 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…
In terms of data structures, absolutely. Thing is, for a lot of applications you don't need all those extra features. Lots of apps are boiled down to "The user inputs this, I do some crunching, they get this output." Whether your ints are signed or not doesn't matter because you're only counting from 1 to 100 anyway. One thing it did do very well was to make string manipulation and conversion simple.
Apparently VB does support unsigned data types in some version: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/visual-basic/program...
Re: Microsoft plots the end of Visual Basic
#245Earlier quoted context omitted.
CMD is the worst language I ever saw. It's full of hacks for simplest tasks. The only reason I'm using it is for old systems where PS is not preinstalled. I used PS to write small scripts and I actually like it. I'm more fluent with bash, but that's only because I used bash a lot. PowerShell feels more robust, no silly space-in-filename problems, no silly parsing of text output to access fields. May be it's ugly for…
"I would love to learn why people think that power shell is ugly, especially comparing with bash. " I don't think people compare it with bash, but with more modern languages.
Powershell was made to allow launching arbitrary programs with redirections and pipes. That's why some language choices were made and that's why I'm interested in comparison with bash.
Re: Microsoft plots the end of Visual Basic
#246Earlier quoted context omitted.
They had an opportunity to make a whole new, good, scripting language. And blew it spectacularly.
The decision to make the console output as the return value of a function alone almost destroys it for larger scripting projects. It’s a really bad decision and they could still fix it by adding some environment variable that disables this “feature” while staying compatible with old scripts.
This behavior? https://devblogs.microsoft.com/powershell/suppressing-return...
It seems like it might make some kind of sense, since it doesn't output directly to the console but rather to a pipe. Bash functions sort of work the same way since they don't have complex return values (aside from exit codes) other than the function's output stream.
Re: Microsoft plots the end of Visual Basic
#247I wonder what the cost of creating a vb6/ Delphi style environment with Python as the language would be. This could be a very popular project if someone could get it off the ground. Something like a vscode plugin?
I have no idea how that would work, but I would put real money into a kickstarter for someone who did know.
I hate GUI programming in Python. Even simple 'click here' to run involves more concepts than my kids want to know yet
Re: Microsoft plots the end of Visual Basic
#248I 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 won't say I loved it, but VB5/6 was one of the best tools I've ever used to create CRUD apps for Windows.
Re: Microsoft plots the end of Visual Basic
#249I wonder what the cost of creating a vb6/ Delphi style environment with Python as the language would be. This could be a very popular project if someone could get it off the ground. Something like a vscode plugin? I have no idea how that would work, but I would put real money into a kickstarter for someone who did know. I hate GUI programming in Python. Even simple 'click here' to run involves more concepts than my k…
Scratch is probably the most logical choice for teaching programming to kids (at least in an age when it's still hard for them to concentrate on multiple concepts before seing some results)
Re: Microsoft plots the end of Visual Basic
#250Earlier quoted context omitted.
>but everything you can do in VB6 you can do in powershell Excel modules? OK not quite exactly the same but close. I wrote a finite capacity planner system for a factory a fair few years ago in Excel to replace a huge number of Lotus 1-2-3 thingies with a vast amount of copy n paste from text screens and random sheets and what not. I started with an automated forecast. We used an (memory may be fading) exponential fi…
Instead of building your logic in a module, just use powershell to create and manipulate Excel objects. You don't even need Excel! http://ramblingcookiemonster.github.io/PSExcel-Intro/
PS wasn't invented when my smart new Pentium 60 was crunching the thing I wrote about above! Cripes: OLE was the latest whizz bang thing in Windows back then.