I am actually trying to make an open source successor, but using Javascript instead of Basic, at https://github.com/yazz/yazz and a demo at yazz.com
Ask HN: Why did Visual Basic die?
171–180 of 535 posts
Re: Ask HN: Why did Visual Basic die?
#172VB died because Microsoft killed it off (through other products).
Re: Ask HN: Why did Visual Basic die?
#173I 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…
You might need slightly more technical knowledge, but not so much that you can't have a simple CRUD app running in a day or so of work.
Well that’s quite a professional bubble you live in. Web dev is truly a frog in a boiling water.
If my VB/Delphi/Access/PIC buddy who made various apps and hardware back in the day asked me for a platform and I advised him to use what HN praises as “simple”, then pretty sure he’ll never contact me with it again.
I mean, yeah, CRUD is not hard to do by tutorial. But he will laugh at my CRUD explanation, because he never ever thought about implementing input data channels. It’s akin to positioning heads above a cylinder to fetch a database record.
Re: Ask HN: Why did Visual Basic die?
#174The 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.
Airtable is the closest I have found for ease of use - users that don’t know SQL can put together basic queries and views quickly.
Re: Ask HN: Why did Visual Basic die?
#175Related but off-topic: Nothing I see today compares to the productivity that I saw with Lotus Notes, Dbase 3 and 4, Paradox, Microsoft Access, Foxpro, and a few other things from that era. There are some really good SAAS offerings that target this space (e.g. Airtable), but none of them seem as dominant as I would expect. There was a time that if you wanted a simple application that could be covered with 3-4 tables and 5-6 views, any of the things I mentioned above could handle it. You could explain the business problem and hand a developer a book on any of the above technologies and expect to have a working product a month later. Today, this isn't really true. It does seem we've gone backwards a bit...
Re: Ask HN: Why did Visual Basic die?
#176The 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.
Equally serious question: what is the use case for Access?
It's been installed on every corp workstation I've had and it's never been useful. In my experience either Excel can do it or you need a real programming language/database.
Re: Ask HN: Why did Visual Basic die?
#177Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
SQLite. It's not close in terms of ease-of-use of the GUI administration and forms, but as a single-server database solution to embed into a line-of-business app it's fantastic.
The GUI and forms is what made Access, though. Back in the day I actually made a system with Access that connected to a SQL Server database on the backend rather than Access's file-based engine.
It's a real shame Access died, now there's no path from a spreadsheet to something more sensible.
Re: Ask HN: Why did Visual Basic die?
#178Visual 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 p…
> 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.
Which was your experience because you knew C. VB appealed to people who were not programmers (or not very good ones like me). Microsoft effectively tossed an easy to learn procedural language in the trash and said "go learn all these advanced CS concepts or stop writing stuff" to which most hardcore VB users chose the latter.
Re: Ask HN: Why did Visual Basic die?
#179I 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 :-)
Oh yes. And VBscript in the browser as well (as long as it was IE). One of their attempts at browser "lock-in"
Re: Ask HN: Why did Visual Basic die?
#180Yet I can't help wondering what problems it had that caused them to abandon it?
Tech comes and goes, there’s nothing to vb specifically. As a language it’s pretty limited, tedious and quirky.
Moreover, why hasn't someone come out with a solid replacement?
Because webdev at its core is a community of stubborn smart guys who love the complexity and hate dull business code. They will present absurd arguments like I can do this and that, as if it couldn’t be packed into a vb component and drag-dropped onto a form from a palette without accompanying 1kloc boilerplate and pages of configuration documentation with no sane defaults. VB GUI model may be obsolete, gray and non-responsive, but no one prevents from building responsive interfaces wysiwyg way. My peer web designer does it without bothering with html/css much and it works for her for decades. All the tech is there, it’s just nobody’s collective interest to combine it into a business RAD instead of an intermediate haskell-level mindfuck starter kit. You can’t burn hundreds of millions doing actual work on a platform that everyone could start using solo in just a few days and deliver a working solution next week, even if raw and clumsy as it usually goes with non-pros.
I’d like to get a better and less bitter explanation, but there is none.