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Ask HN: Why did Visual Basic die?

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Re: Ask HN: Why did Visual Basic die?

#111
post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

More common, in my experience, was the 2 tier app where a (very) fat client directly talked to the db, and all the businesses and data access logic was intermixed with UI event handlers and some stored procedures.

Re: Ask HN: Why did Visual Basic die?

#112

Visual 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…

[deleted]

Re: Ask HN: Why did Visual Basic die?

#113

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.

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…

With side-effect free functions: https://youtu.be/0yKf8TrLUOw

Re: Ask HN: Why did Visual Basic die?

#114
I recently wondered:

Why is there no VB-Like tool for building Electron - Apps using eg. React-Widgets & Javascript as the scripting - language?

I'm not married to Electron vs. another similar, possibly more modern / less ressource hungry alternative; or another Frontend Framework.

But it seems to be it should be possible to do a VB-Style thing using these kinds of tools, Drag+Drop, and Javascript, most of the components should be available already...

And it could be a fun environment for prototyping, having fun, creating really bad games & greeting card apps again like in the 90s/2000s etc etc.

It could be a fun learning environment for newbies while a powerful GUI builder for multiple platforms for experts..

Why isn't there such a thing? Would somebody please build this? :D

Re: Ask HN: Why did Visual Basic die?

#116
post #42

Earlier 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.

Development in VB6 was basically dragging and dropping controls onto a window or dialog box, setting properties on them, and then filling in snippets of code to tie things together.

And "control" here means anything from simple labels and buttons up to database connections and embedded COM objects.

Literally anybody could bang out a simple Windows .exe like nobody's business.

It would have been really cool if Microsoft included it in the OS like they used to do with QBasic.

Re: Ask HN: Why did Visual Basic die?

#117

How about some love for Quick BASIC? That was my big Christmas present once upon a time when the dinosaurs still roamed the earth.

Oh you spoiled little children with your integrated development environment and in place editing. Real programmers used GW-Basic with consecutive line numbers.

Re: Ask HN: Why did Visual Basic die?

#120
post #42

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 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.

Have you tried https://anvil.works? (I'm a founder!)

It's quite explicitly VB-esque (only using Python), and having a single paradigm rather than stitching together several different programs speeds things up even for those who can write HTML/JS/CSS in their sleep. (And of course, you can drop out to JS/CSS/HTML if you want.) Overall I think the development speed is comparable to VB6.

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