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…
Ask HN: Why did Visual Basic die?
81–90 of 535 posts
Re: Ask HN: Why did Visual Basic die?
#82Are 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…
So it's not that Microsoft missed it, it is that a big shift happened and it was specifically targeted against them. There's nothing they could have done, except to embrace it, and they did. Visual Basic Script existed and was very popular for a while. IE4 ruled the web.
The shift to web based technologies is a Google and an open source win. And it is also an inferior experience. That was the price we paid =)
Re: Ask HN: Why did Visual Basic die?
#83Microsoft 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.
Re: Ask HN: Why did Visual Basic die?
#84Re: Ask HN: Why did Visual Basic die?
#85Re: Ask HN: Why did Visual Basic die?
#86Earlier quoted context omitted.
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?
#87* "Visual .NET" (aka "Visual Fred" http://catb.org/jargon/html/V/Visual-Fred.html ) was released by Microsoft. This was an incompatible language confusingly also called Visual Basic. I don't think Microsoft realized how angry this made developers and businesses, who were being asked to spend hundreds of billions of dollars (USD) to rewrite code just to keep the same functionality. Before that time, many thought that Visual Basic's wide use gave it a kind of "herd immunity". I don't have numbers with me, but I remember that years later that a study found that some were sticking to the original Visual Basic (even though it was no longer supported), a few had moved to Visual .NET, and many other had abandoned Visual Basic entirely (some to C#, others beyond). In short, the Visual Basic community was split into multiple communities, and anyone using Visual Basic would have to worry about either lack of support or yet another harmful change.
* The rise of the web and of platforms other than Windows (including Android, iOS, MacOS, Linux). Visual Basic is fine when you send files via sneakernet to another Windows user. Now people want to access through their web browser, smartphone, etc. If you have a website, anything can access it (as long as they have the permissions), and you don't have to worry about synchronizing data changes the way you do if people make changes on their local device. Most of the simple "fill in a form" kinds of applications that Visual Basic was used for are more sensibly web applications (server side or client side).
Visual Basic is still used. And yes, I think there could be better tools for developing software. But as best as I recall, that's how we ended up here.
Re: Ask HN: Why did Visual Basic die?
#88Are 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…
I remember, in some sense, Google (and also a group of anti Microsoft developers) encouraged web development as a strategy to break the Windows software monopoly. So it's not that Microsoft missed it, it is that a big shift happened and it was specifically targeted against them. There's nothing they could have done, except to embrace it, and they did. Visual Basic Script existed and was very popular for a while. IE4…
Even ASP and IIS etc. insisted on having its own stack -- superior in some ways, but way less compatible and more expensive. Again their own doing. Free/cheap won out, I guess :)
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend,_and_extinguis...
(edit: how the heck do you actually properly make hyperlinks on HN? I always struggle with this)
Re: Ask HN: Why did Visual Basic die?
#89I 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…
Don't forget that VB.NET was a thing. I worked on a web-based client management system that used VB.NET on the back-end.
Re: Ask HN: Why did Visual Basic die?
#90Does 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.
Excel is literally 2D programming. Us mortal developers who can only put lines below one another are incapable of comprehending it, so we only get to ask the wise finance people how their enigma works. On a serious note, I dread excel. If your PC is set to german, excel will translate the VBA keywords to german. But if you want to type them, you have to do that in english and then have excel translate them. I don't w…
At least my spaghetti code goes into one direction only...