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Ask HN: Why did Visual Basic die?

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Re: Ask HN: Why did Visual Basic die?

#61

Post by stuff4ben »

amtamt wrote: post #47
dghlsakjg wrote: post #30

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…

> VB was great if you needed to do something limited to a single machine. VB6 used to work with oracle across network.

Yes, the common 3 tier app at the time with ODBC to connect to your databases.

Re: Ask HN: Why did Visual Basic die?

#62

Post by dang »

Related. Others?

Something Pretty Right: The History and Legacy of Visual Basic - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35192913 - March 2023 (259 comments)

RAD Basic – Compatible with Visual Basic 6 projects - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31282195 - May 2022 (208 comments)

Ask HN: Modern, easy-to-start with alternatives to Visual Basic - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30606244 - March 2022 (11 comments)

Microsoft plots the end of Visual Basic - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22570684 - March 2020 (280 comments)

Ask HN: What is the modern equivalent of Visual Basic? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20548849 - July 2019 (10 comments)

The Rise and Fall of Visual Basic - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20255140 - June 2019 (149 comments)

Visual Basic Turns 25 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11755041 - May 2016 (145 comments)

Why I am called "the Father of Visual Basic" (1996) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9229434 - March 2015 (80 comments)

The Birth of Visual Basic (2006) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8438845 - Oct 2014 (59 comments)

Linus Torvalds, Visual Basic Fan (2006) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6005587 - July 2013 (48 comments)

The Silent Majority: Why Visual Basic 6 Still Thrives - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4085372 - June 2012 (91 comments)

Re: Ask HN: Why did Visual Basic die?

#63

Post by jasode »

>nothing I have found compares to that development experience today. I would go so far as to say we've gone backwards in a big way.

I did Visual Basic 3.0 through VB 6.0 corporate development for a few years back in the 1990s. The closest equivalent today for desktop apps that still has Microsoft's focus on future innovation is C# with Windows Forms. (I downplay the "obvious" comparison of VB.NET to VB 6.0 because Microsoft already said they will "stop evolving" Visual Basic .NET -- so that's a technology dead end and will fall further and further behind the latest C# as the years go by.)

I personally don't experience that C#/Winforms has gone backwards from VB 6.0. Workflow feels much the same as VB6: Drag some GUI components like text boxes and buttons onto a form, code the controls' event handlers, build the exe.

Re: Ask HN: Why did Visual Basic die?

#65

Post by eli »

schmookeeg wrote: post #60
mamonster wrote: post #8

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.

Healthcare and insurance too! I transform into some glorious magical elf when I volunteer to do the VBA tasks nobody else understands or can lower themselves to do. You can make Excel do some real wacky stuff. I have a spreadsheet that actually calls out to exec() to run a curl POST on commandline and consume REST API endpoints, parse the results, and update the spreadsheet -- why on earth?? because the API was ready…

Pretty sure you can access a REST API from VBA without resorting to exec()

Re: Ask HN: Why did Visual Basic die?

#66

Post by stuff4ben »

dghlsakjg wrote: post #30

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…

Yep, this is the right answer. I was there, 23 years ago programming VB6, making apps that were wrapped up in InstallShield, burnt to a CD, and then mailed to our customers. We did do some web things with Apache and some C++ apps interfaced via CGI. But it seemed that overnight Java and Servlets came about and made CGI-bin obsolete and slow as molasses. Add in JSPs and Struts and you had fully functional web apps that were fast and scalable.

Re: Ask HN: Why did Visual Basic die?

#67

Post by HeyLaughingBoy »

jasode wrote: post #63

>nothing I have found compares to that development experience today. I would go so far as to say we've gone backwards in a big way. I did Visual Basic 3.0 through VB 6.0 corporate development for a few years back in the 1990s. The closest equivalent today for desktop apps that still has Microsoft's focus on future innovation is C# with Windows Forms. (I downplay the "obvious" comparison of VB.NET to VB 6.0 because Mi…

I've only done a small amount of VB programming, but from what I remember of it, WinForms + C# is lightyears ahead of VB.

Re: Ask HN: Why did Visual Basic die?

#69

Post by oaiey »

Meph504 wrote: post #49

vb didn't die, it evolved into vb.net, but the market place has shifted to C# for the most part. 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 s…

People always worry that Microsoft is silverlighting (that is a verb now) MAUI. I think that would be the end of VisualStudio. The word Visual had a meaning. When they would give up MAUI in favor of React Native (like Office) or Blazor (like the popular opinion), why the hack someone would buy a VS license. And when the think they could again commercialize .NET itself, then .NET would be dead. Modern Java, Flutter and TypeScript would easily swallow their market shares. MAUI, Blazor and .NET are an awesome set of products if they would just put some more concentration in MAUI.

Re: Ask HN: Why did Visual Basic die?

#70

Post by TylerE »

oaiey wrote: post #56
crazygringo wrote: post #32

I used VB all the way from 1.0 to 6.0. And when VB.NET came out came out in 2002, that was exactly when all the types of GUI-database projects VB6 was used for professionally, started being built in PHP/MySQL/HTML/CSS instead. The switch would have happened anyways, but the fact that VB.NET wasn't backwards-compatible made it really easy to switch since you were going to have to learn/build something new anyway -- ot…

Good explanation. Hobbiest switched. Because IIS and Asp.net run very well with VB.NET. but who could afford that compared to PHP.

The bigger pain point, from memory, was having an ODBC-compliant driver so the OS could actually talk to your DB. That basically meant MSSQL if you wanted to co-exist happily with early dotnet.
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