People want more these days. With VB you could write a CRUD application that saved data to a database and ran some reports. But now people want the database to pull in multiple feeds from other businesses via API, people want it to be available on the web, it needs to have a self service component so the customer can also log in, at the back end the database is connected to several other systems with daily feeds coming in and out. Shit is just much more complicated these days.
Ask HN: Why did Visual Basic die?
101–110 of 535 posts
Re: Ask HN: Why did Visual Basic die?
#102IMO the OOP trend of the 90s (Java, C++, Objective-C) made VB look bad.
Re: Ask HN: Why did Visual Basic die?
#103Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
ASP .Net Core comes with it's own host of options:
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/aspnet/core/tutorials/choo...
If I am doing desktop development, you can bet I am still using WinForms, which are relatively easy to debug (if not as pretty) as WPF. I am usually building internal tooling, without paying customers, and sometimes for a user base of just me.
Re: Ask HN: Why did Visual Basic die?
#104Earlier quoted context omitted.
I can write HTML/CSS/JS and a few back-end languages like PHP in my sleep but there's no way I could hand-code a web app as fast as I could a desktop app in 1997 using VB. I would LOVE it if I could, though.
I've never written VB, but I can bang out a React UI in jsxstyle like nobody's business. You've piqued my curiosity.
Check out Lazarus and FreePascal
Re: Ask HN: Why did Visual Basic die?
#105Visual Basic (both of them) still exist, but their use has dropped dramatically through some big changes: * "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…
Lol, my first programming gig as a teenager was performing a VB6 -> VB.NET "upgrade" of a 200K sloc legacy desktop application, which obviously ended up being a total rewrite. Everything in my career since then has seemed easy in comparison.
Re: Ask HN: Why did Visual Basic die?
#106I started my career with FoxPro for DOS, dabbled a bit with Visual FoxPro and then I found Visual Basic. Spent a lot of fun years with it before moving to ASP and web development in general. Not exactly sure what was the reason for its demise. I guess .NET killed it.
Re: Ask HN: Why did Visual Basic die?
#107> despite all the advances in technology since then, nothing I have found compares to that development experience today
You are going to have to qualify this a lot more, because it is absolutely not true. Coding VB was...fine. Language features were primitive, even compared to what was available in the mainstream back then. The tooling was fully proprietary and expensive. Languages and IDEs today are 1000x better in every way.
Re: Ask HN: Why did Visual Basic die?
#108they did linq badly after linq2xml and linq2sql
Re: Ask HN: Why did Visual Basic die?
#109I 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 can write HTML/CSS/JS and a few back-end languages like PHP in my sleep but there's no way I could hand-code a web app as fast as I could a desktop app in 1997 using VB. I would LOVE it if I could, though.
Same. I’m very good at cranking out Tailwind + React UIs, but nothing touches the productivity I had with VB6 or even early C# and Winforms.
Re: Ask HN: Why did Visual Basic die?
#110Python is the new VB