41–50 of 535 posts
Does VBA for Excel count? Because if it does then VBA for Excel has reached the"nuclear resistant cockroach" level in finance. You wouldn't believe what sort of processes in very big banks/financial institutions are built using 10 year old VBA macros. In fact, VBA consulting for finance is a very juicy cottage industry at least in Europe to this very day.
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…
I would LOVE it if I could, though.
If Microsoft had put more effort into Internet Explorer and VBScript ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VBScript ), today's web could look very different, and in some ways better.
Although to be fair, the distinction between the language and libraries has never been very clear in BASIC variants.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
You bring up a good point, which is that I remember most the GUI builder. Basic isn't really that great a language, all things considered. But being able to quickly design and deploy GUI apps with VB was better than anything I've encountered since. There are things like WebFlow and FlutterFlow but those tools feel clunky by comparison.
Hmmm...I'm wondering if you have ever used Netbeans. There is a GUI builder for Java Swing. Top notch.
Are you talking about VB the language, or Visual Studio the IDE with its awesome GUI builder for WinForms (and not so awesome ones for the subsequent Windows GUI layers, forget what they're called). VB is still around but desktop apps in general (and thus VS's GUI builder) largely gave way to web technologies invented outside Microsoft. The dev experience is definitely worse though. Visual Studio was sooooo nice and…
Your definition of "ease of use" is amazing. /s
- LISP environments
- Smalltalk environments
- Symbolics genera
- Mesa and Cedar
- Apple's Newton
Besides things like Oberon...
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…
VB6 used to work with oracle across network.
Does VBA for Excel count? Because if it does then VBA for Excel has reached the"nuclear resistant cockroach" level in finance. You wouldn't believe what sort of processes in very big banks/financial institutions are built using 10 year old VBA macros. In fact, VBA consulting for finance is a very juicy cottage industry at least in Europe to this very day.
If Excel stops working, financial institutions around the world would collapse.
What has died, is the maturity of microsofts tool set, they keep changing their concept/design/platform.
silverlight/wpf/uwp/winui2|3/etc..
vb was around for nearly 2 decades and had a very mature tool set, everything since then hasn't gotten nearly that sort of life span or dedication to tool sets.
Developing in visual studio now, is more like web dev in the 2000s, I can't tell you how often you have to go to the xaml and make correction or adjustments that the UI just can't get right, or just goes bonkers and can't render the UI at all until something is fixed.
It is really sad, because the power of those old drag and drop builders that just worked meant that prototyping and mocking up applications was much much faster.
now standing up a UI based project takes ages, I'll usually do a console application now, and are dumping results to a API or console.
VB (and BASIC in general) has a legacy of being a procedural language. In the late 90’s and early 2000’s, there was a massive push to leverage object oriented programming and design. The births of Java in the 90’s and then C# in the 2000’s were clear catalysts to abandon procedural programming. Of course in .NET VB has nearly all of the OO capabilities that C# has, but I think most developers just decided to go “all-…
Honestly, I was never a fan of Basic but I still don't understand why there isn't a GUI app builder as productive as the VB6-era tools were for any language.
There’s no reason to have a drag and drop UI builder anymore.