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Ask HN: Why did Visual Basic die?

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Re: Ask HN: Why did Visual Basic die?

#151

Post by TrackerFF »

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.

Pre-face: I write a lot of VBA

VBA is kind of the result of people only - ONLY - wanting to use Excel for everything. I work with those people. They have mastered excel, but have little to zero interest in learning anything else, and would rather see the world be built around excel.

So you (like me) get tasked with building applications and forms in VBA.

I was STOKED when MS announced Python for excel, but alas, turned out to not be what I (and many other) wanted.

What's the medicine? Dunno, hire analysts that are more open to using other tools . Don't get me wrong, I love using excel for many tasks - but damnit, it's not the only tool.

Re: Ask HN: Why did Visual Basic die?

#152

Post by nobodyandproud »

What made VB6 super-productive and quick to get up and running also made it terrible for long-term maintenance, because it hid too much of the details.

Then there were language warts like set versus let (strong vs weak pointers), for example, which was way above the paygrade of the average VB6 coders; and having to rely on the Win32 API anyway in order to start doing actual work and work around all of its limitaitons.

One thing VB6 did do right was forcing interface-based inheritance: Composition over class inheritance was seen as a weakness back then but it was proven as the right concept.

This is just my opinion!

Re: Ask HN: Why did Visual Basic die?

#153

Post by anigbrowl »

meredydd wrote: post #120
_f1dq wrote: 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.

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.

It looks significantly better since the last time I checked it - well done!

Re: Ask HN: Why did Visual Basic die?

#154

Post by bonzini »

mamcx wrote: post #134

The reason is even bigger than just VB. MS at the time just decide to fully kill the "enthusiast" developer and the "single/truly small" team developer. This is mostly covered under the "RAD" umbrella. It kills VB, FoxPro, and now more evidently, Access (more like let it slowly die). .NET + Visual Studio + Sql Server are not a substitute in this market. Them are for "professional developer"/"a small cog in a big mach…

Serious question: what is a good alternative to Access (edit: to build a GUI frontend to a database)? The database design tools and basic forms were incredibly easy to use, and there were very good tutorials for everything else. LibreOffice Base is different and not even close in comprehensiveness, and there seems to be nothing replacing it that isn't a super expensive SaaS.

Re: Ask HN: Why did Visual Basic die?

#156

Post by nobodyandproud »

Guvante wrote: post #139
nobodyandproud wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Interestingly enough there are a small handful of things VB.NET and C++/CLI can do which C# can't, which enable the former languages to have better interoperability with COM interfaces. That was with .NET Framework and I'm not sure what the story is today with .NET Core aka .NET 5+.

They eventually added optional names parameters which made the interop problem much better for C# compared to VB. C# wasn't as good still but you no longer had to put earlier params at their default value (which is what made it unusable). C++/CLI will probably remain king of interop though being a Frankenstein combination of the .NET runtime and C++.

The other headache was indexed properties, but I don't think that's changed.

C++/CLI is no man's land and I tried my best to avoid it; and so far, I've managed; sometimes after-the-fact.

Re: Ask HN: Why did Visual Basic die?

#158

Post by eternityforest »

nottheengineer wrote: post #38
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.

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…

The 2D aspect is the part of Excel I don't understand. Why does it have to be a grid?

It's great for laying out things meant to print, and making invoices and stuff... But why didn't we have code files and proper fixed layout DB-style tables as "pages" that can go in a workbook?

Maybe keeping everything as 2D as possible is a necessary compromise for the spatial thinkers out there, and they just wouldn't want it if it was full of boring linear stuff.

I love the reactivity and the concept that anywhere you put a value, you can put an =expression. But the 2D stuff seems like it's for the people who always have a sense of where things are in space.

They've done a good job of convincing people that it's not programming and they can do it, I can't really complain, because if Excel didn't exist we might all still have to use paper on a regular basis, or completely unstructured text files.

Re: Ask HN: Why did Visual Basic die?

#159

Post by underlipton »

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 used it as a coding layman in 15-buck-an-hour "admin" (clerk/secretary) roles to automate some processes that my predecessors had done by hand. Mostly just copying entries from a spreadsheet to company Excel/Powerpoint templates and printing them without killing myself copy/pasting or going into the save/print dialog 50 times. It did its work as something any old schmuck could harness to save themselves from carpal tunnel.

To that point, I imagine that there are a LOT of admin jobs (or, at least, a lot of tasks) that could be almost completely automated away. It's probably not even a capability issue, but one of job security on the employee side and a lack of *waves hands vaguely* on the employer side.

Re: Ask HN: Why did Visual Basic die?

#160

Post by jenscow »

_f1dq wrote: post #42
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…

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.

Be careful what you wish for: https://www.wix.com/
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