Same reason as Borland Pascal.
Ask HN: Why did Visual Basic die?
71–80 of 535 posts
Re: Ask HN: Why did Visual Basic die?
#72Earlier quoted context omitted.
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()
It only works with toy examples and then stops working. For reasons unknown, as it should work.
Re: Ask HN: Why did Visual Basic die?
#73Does 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 know of a restaurant franchisee with 170+ locations that uses a home grown ERP system built in VBA on top of Access by an accountant about 20 years ago. I once had to update it to optimize (minimize) front-line staff working hours so the company didn't have to pay health insurance for those employees. A real nightmare of a task in more ways than one!
My first programming job in the 90s while I was still in college was building systems exactly like you describe (and they were as poorly built as you think hah). I worked for a small IT programming/consulting shop. We did small jobs like this in town in addition to installing networks, IVRs, etc... while working on larger software to sell (which is an entirely different/crazy story that involved burning CD demos and using a hand 'stomper' to label and then mail them out).
Re: Ask HN: Why did Visual Basic die?
#74Does 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.
There is a book called: Professional Excel Development. If you want to get into it. You could probably use that book to build an OS in Excel. I'm not joking.
It's no more crazy than trying to build an OS out of a web browser.
Re: Ask HN: Why did Visual Basic die?
#75I started my career with VB/VBA/Access, but got burned by one of their non-backward compatible upgrades (I don't remember which versions) that derailed an important project. This was around the time that Java was what the cool kids were using, and I was very amenable to trying open source after that experience, and I never looked back.
It was a great experience though, especially for a self-taught beginner long before code academies and YouTube.
Re: Ask HN: Why did Visual Basic die?
#76I think the answer is: because Microsoft let it. I'm a big fan of modern .NET, but my biggest complaint is that Microsoft views, and always has, the CLR as the C# Language Runtime and not the Common Language Runtime.
For example, see the relationship between F# and C#. The CLR is constantly getting features that are only to support features in C#, leaving F# in a position where they either don't get the feature, can't add the feature, or begrudgingly add the feature to keep up compatibility with C#, which is something it does take seriously. But this has the effect of "dirtying up" the F# language by either adding features that don't really belong in the language or keeping features out.
The other thing is that C# consistently adds features to itself that are inspired by F#, since F# already implements these features on the CLR, thus showing their viability. So what happens is that C# continually approaches a more bloated language with a subset of it being a poor copy of F#. But then F# gets dragged along towards having a small subset of C# in it for compatibility purposes. So it's simultaneously making both languages worse.
Even the iron languages project that lead to IronPython, IronRuby, etc. was a bit of a Trojan horse to test out and exercise the CLR and .NET with no intention of ever providing long-term support for those projects. The DLR, which was implemented to support those, appears to be just maintained by a skeleton crew of people invested in it, probably by those interested in keeping IronPython up and running.
I do not understand why Microsoft takes this approach. It is myopic, shows a misunderstanding of their own technology in the CLR, and ultimately turns C# into another C++, leave dead languages and projects in the wake.
Re: Ask HN: Why did Visual Basic die?
#77I feel as if I remember using a VB compiler back in the late 80s. Am a hallucinating?
VB was first released in 1991. If you're certain that you remember it from the late 80's, then you may be thinking of QBASIC. I first learned to write code in QBASIC running on MS-DOS.
Re: Ask HN: Why did Visual Basic die?
#78There's still no better GUI toolkit out there than VB6 that I have used. It was amazing. Problem is a lot of apps that would have been traditional LOB apps written in VB/C# have moved to the web so demand isn't there's clear advantages to C# as a language over VB.
Netbeans Java Swing GUI builder is far better. That's without factoring in the enormous third party component landscape that is available.
Oh man, I remember building GUI apps with it in college. My professor only let me use it on the condition that I could fully explain what every component was doing. I could. I took the generated swing code and added a massive amount of comments, but even having to do that I was still an order of magnitude faster than every other CS student without. A lot of my peers were super jealous that I had so much free time, but they weren't willing to invest time in their tools (gdb, perl, regex, sql, etc). It was quite the force multiplier.
Re: Ask HN: Why did Visual Basic die?
#79Does 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.
My brother is a mechanical engineer and apparently, there's lots of Excel VBA in traditional industries as well.
I can confirm this: I know several mechanical engineers that do mission critical-type systems (think "power plants"), and they routinely use Excel VBA for calculations.
Re: Ask HN: Why did Visual Basic die?
#80Microsoft accidentally killed it moving to .NET and the increasingly stupid GUI libraries they offered up. Silverlight, 32 bit native, winforms etc and etc. Web development meanwhile went bonkers and VB was a poor cousin to C# very suddenly. Its a shame, VB was not for purists but it was very productive.
Do not say WinForms is stupid. The rest I am more than okay with.
I don't think they did. They said increasingly so. They're just getting at Microsoft continually re-inventing the wheel and then abandoning that wheel when it comes to their GUI libraries. There's WinForms -> WPF -> UDP -> WinUI, Xamarin Forms -> .NET MAUI, and then the evolution of Avalonia and Uno as third-parties trying to step in. And all of those options still exist! You literally have a minimum of 8 GUI options, at least on Windows. There are of course more by external parties.