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Something Pretty Right: The History and Legacy of Visual Basic

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Re: Something Pretty Right: The History and Legacy of Visual Basic

#101

Post by interfixus »

DeathArrow wrote: post #90
interfixus wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For what it's worth, I am a bus driver these days; a real one, no metaphor involved. And I sufficently disliked and mistrusted Visual Basic that already in the mid nineties I instigated a complete ban on any vb**run.dll on all computers under my jurisdiction. Mainly a heuristic: VB applications tended overwhelmingly to not being worth the inevitable trouble. I have proudly carried this curmudgery into the present cen…

For your own good, let's hope the bus dispatcher of the lines you work for doesn't apply the same line of thinking.

I wish they did. We work with terrible software.

Re: Something Pretty Right: The History and Legacy of Visual Basic

#102

Post by kitd »

jdiez17 wrote: post #62
Pamar wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sorta like Excel, then?

Excel is another amazing piece of software, that is almost universally looked down upon by programmers. Why make complex calculations in a GUI if you can just write a Python script with numpy and pandas!? And yet, so much of the world runs on excel spreadsheets being sent back and forth. Why? Because 1) it has a low skill floor and very high ceiling, 2) everyone uses the same tool (or at least it's backward and forwa…

Excel is another amazing piece of software, that is almost universally looked down upon by programmers.

I read somewhere that there are 10 x more Excel "programmers" in the world than programmers for all other languages put together.

Re: Something Pretty Right: The History and Legacy of Visual Basic

#103

Post by philbarr »

deafpolygon wrote: post #68
fredsmith219 wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Access could easily become a victim of its own success if the dataset got too large. I made some money off of a couple projects where that happened. I had to convert them to sqlserver to both handle the data load and for true multiuser.

That is true. People don't understand that there is an upper limit to Access before you run into issues - but it's fairly large.. what was it? 4GB? Edit: 2gb!

Aaah - back in the day when we used to link 26 Access databases together, one for the first letter of a customer's surname... :)

Re: Something Pretty Right: The History and Legacy of Visual Basic

#104

Post by lincpa »

codeulike wrote: post #94
rob74 wrote: post #28

Hilarious quote (notwithstanding the fact that bus drivers usually have to work shifts, also on weekends): > Almost all Visual Basic 6 programmers were content with what Visual Basic 6 did. They were happy to be bus drivers: to leave the office at 5 p.m. (or 4:30 p.m. on a really nice day) instead of working until midnight; to play with their families on weekends instead of trudging back to the office. They didn't la…

VB to VB.NET was more to do with .NET arriving with the .NET Framework, and one of the reasons for the .NET Framework was all about keeping up with the (at the time) amazing framework/core library that Java had. It was also about web front ends which of course VB6 could not do. In the old days people used to custom-build massive CRUD desktop database applications for their company to use internally and I built some o…

[dead]

Re: Something Pretty Right: The History and Legacy of Visual Basic

#105

Post by nevertoolate »

2-718-281-828 wrote: post #72
interfixus wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For what it's worth, I am a bus driver these days; a real one, no metaphor involved. And I sufficently disliked and mistrusted Visual Basic that already in the mid nineties I instigated a complete ban on any vb**run.dll on all computers under my jurisdiction. Mainly a heuristic: VB applications tended overwhelmingly to not being worth the inevitable trouble. I have proudly carried this curmudgery into the present cen…

Public transportation? I'm curious probably because I do consider switching careers. Bus driving - in my fantasy - provides some of the features I sort of desire (clear schedule, clear expectations) while lacking those I annoy (further educating outside of work, tendency to take problems home with you). What's your situation?

I recommend watching the film Paterson, with Adam Driver (a bus driver in the film)

Re: Something Pretty Right: The History and Legacy of Visual Basic

#106

Post by kitd »

pif wrote: post #84
throwawaaarrgh wrote: post #13

You know why Visual Basic was the best programming language ever made? Because it wasn't a programming language. Nerds just can't wrap their heads around this idea: no normal person wants to be a programmer. But they do want to make little custom things to help them get stuff done in life. Just like nobody wants to be a plumber, but they do want to be able to fix their faucet.

Visual Basic shares a fundamental truth with Internet Explorer: popular does not imply good.

Well, except that VB didn't become popular simply by being shipped by default on millions of Windows desktops. It earned it's popularity by scratching a huge itch (at the time).

Re: Something Pretty Right: The History and Legacy of Visual Basic

#107

Post by whstl »

deafpolygon wrote: post #68
fredsmith219 wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Access could easily become a victim of its own success if the dataset got too large. I made some money off of a couple projects where that happened. I had to convert them to sqlserver to both handle the data load and for true multiuser.

That is true. People don't understand that there is an upper limit to Access before you run into issues - but it's fairly large.. what was it? 4GB? Edit: 2gb!

Funny: back in the late 90s I ran a quite large (for the time) discussion board and everything was stored in an Access MDB file, similar to how people try to do today with SQLite. I didn't know better, that's how I though things worked.

It worked quite well for several years, until of course I reached a limit (which was much smaller than 4GB), and I had to delete old posts.

Re: Something Pretty Right: The History and Legacy of Visual Basic

#108

Post by whstl »

philbarr wrote: post #103
deafpolygon wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is true. People don't understand that there is an upper limit to Access before you run into issues - but it's fairly large.. what was it? 4GB? Edit: 2gb!

Aaah - back in the day when we used to link 26 Access databases together, one for the first letter of a customer's surname... :)

You can add "built a custom database partitioning system" to your resumé. :)

Re: Something Pretty Right: The History and Legacy of Visual Basic

#109

Post by groestl »

mysterydip wrote: post #91
orthoxerox wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

VB.NET wasn't that different as a language, it was more of a Python 2/3 situation. Lots of overall improvements, but not backwards compatible. Terrible, but not catastrophic. What MS did was break the whole ecosystem. VB6 had thousands of third-party libraries distributed as VBX/OCX controls. VB.NET had effectively zero, because it could only use the new WinForms controls. You could upgrade your codebase to VB.NET us…

This could be implied with your python comparison, but meanings of things changed as well. For example dim foo as integer(5) in vb6 would give you 6 elements (0-5) of a 16 bit numeric type. In .net it would give you 5 elements (0-4) of a 32 bit numeric type. For those curious, a really good list of changes is here: http://www.thescarms.com/vbasic/vb6vsvbnet.aspx

Guess the Python ref is even more fitting then, given their controversy around the meaning of bytes / strings ;)

Re: Something Pretty Right: The History and Legacy of Visual Basic

#110

Post by kwhitefoot »

fredsmith219 wrote: post #65
deafpolygon wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And Access! That's one amazing piece of software.

Access could easily become a victim of its own success if the dataset got too large. I made some money off of a couple projects where that happened. I had to convert them to sqlserver to both handle the data load and for true multiuser.

When I worked with Access it was normal to separate the database into separate front end and back end. Then when the quantity of data or latency got too large you could easily convert that to SQL Server.
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