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Ask HN: Why did Visual Basic die?

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Re: Ask HN: Why did Visual Basic die?

#141

Post by EMM_386 »

I was a VB6 developer in the 1990s, and I actually wrote a pretty well known product with it (I bet most people didn't know it was VB6 underneath!).

When I got my first job in software engineering, it was when .Net was in beta. Since I only knew VB, I chose to go with VB.Net and Windows Forms.

Well, that was quite a jarring introduction to actual object oriented programming!

This is the point when a lot of people surrendered. The change was too much, there was no path forward for VB, and Microsoft wanted everyone on .Net.

I eventually switched to C# and we had a hybrid application for a while before it was all ported to C#. It actually went on to become industry leading software in its space.

20+ years later, that doesn't seem to have been a bad choice. Windows Forms is very simple, with a powerful drag-and-drop designer, double-click to hook up events, it's all very similar. Yes, you have to understand object oriented programming much more than you would have under VB, but that's as close as you are going to get from Microsoft on the desktop. They try to hide it as best they can.

I still use Windows Forms if I need to put together something that "just works" on Windows as a desktop app quickly. It's unmatched for that.

There are newer technologies, such as WPF, WinUI3, Avalonia and others for .Net but they come with a complexity that would be above your typical use-case for VB6 back in the day. The VB6 user who just wanted to get stuff done probably doesn't want to have to understand how to implement the MVVM pattern just to get a UI.

Re: Ask HN: Why did Visual Basic die?

#142

Post by aj7 »

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.

Before VBA for Excel, I wrote numerous macros, including ATAN2(x,y) before there was an ATAN2.

Afterwards, forget it. Maybe one.

Re: Ask HN: Why did Visual Basic die?

#143

Post by madrox »

dwheeler wrote: post #87

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…

As someone who was writing Visual Basic.NET back when it came out, there was no upside to it over writing in C#. VB's original sweet spot was for writing small scripts and apps in Windows, and it was the only language available. When the .NET line came out, you could do the same things in whichever language you wanted. When new tasks came in, I started defaulting to C# for that reason. I don't think anyone actually prefers VB syntax. C# has a pretty robust community around it now.

Re: Ask HN: Why did Visual Basic die?

#145

Post by Guvante »

bmitc wrote: post #76

I 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'…

To be fair VB.net originally had dynamic capabilities that C# lacked so at least it possessed features that made its existence justifiable.

However the extreme changes required to go from VB6 -> VB.net made it all kind of moot, might as well rewrite.

Re: Ask HN: Why did Visual Basic die?

#146

Post by aj7 »

davidmurdoch wrote: post #39
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.

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!

This post has more information than you realize.

Re: Ask HN: Why did Visual Basic die?

#147

Post by rathboma »

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…

Does no-one remember VBScript and Active Server Pages (ASP). It was Visual basic as a server-side language, positioned to challenge PHP.

VB made it to the web :-)

Re: Ask HN: Why did Visual Basic die?

#149

Post by serf »

ChicagoDave wrote: post #50
Zelphyr wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Honestly, I was never a fan of Basic but I still don't understand why there isn't a GUI app builder as productive as the VB6-era tools were for any language.

Devs don’t design user interfaces anymore. There are separate disciplines for user experience, graphic design, front-end development, API development, and data storage choices. There’s no reason to have a drag and drop UI builder anymore.

not everything is a team effort, and the desire espoused all over this thread for an equivalency clearly demonstrates that there is a 'market' there.

when some small developer is making a silly one-off app for a mom&pop local store to facilitate a one-off kind of task they aren't interested in handing off work and splitting meager profits. not every company has the whole "front-end/back-end/devops/ux/design/management" paradigm going on.

the reality is that microsoft , a fairly litigious group of people, abandoned a concept for their own reasons; and the rest of the market doesn't exactly know where they can step in that minefield of offering equivalent features to a piece of software that is still on life support by a very very large/valuable/litigious company.

Re: Ask HN: Why did Visual Basic die?

#150

Post by gumballindie »

eternityforest wrote: post #136

The FOSS community could do SO much better if they wanted to, with reactive web tech, typescript instead of basic, a project file format that's easy to work with in Git, Android support, etc. Despite all this talk about no-code, it seems like all we have now is like, a CMS that lets you embed Google maps, but if you want to do anything more you have to use code. Maybe it's just that end users usually don't need to bu…

> with reactive web tech, typescript

I very much doubt. Actually reactive frameworks such as react and languages that transpile in other languages such as trypescript are the reason they couldn't. These overcomplicated, seemingly well architected, tools are in fact just a fractal of poor design.

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