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Ask HN: Why did Visual Basic die?

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Re: Ask HN: Why did Visual Basic die?

#181

Post by davidmurdoch »

aj7 wrote: post #146
davidmurdoch wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

What do you mean? Are you suggesting you can figure out who the company is?

Re: Ask HN: Why did Visual Basic die?

#182

Post by Spinnaker_ »

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.

And not just old school financial institutions. Jane Street used to run out of an excel sheet. Many hedge funds still do.

Re: Ask HN: Why did Visual Basic die?

#184

Post by SoftTalker »

j-a-a-p wrote: post #161
amtamt wrote: 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.

Same here, we did a VB6 project that allowed the customer to chat with their remote mortgage advisor using a webcam, around '98. The client was supposed to go to a local branch of the bank and then connect to the banks HQ. I have also wondered why the software industry with the arrival of Internet went away from all these excellent tools. Not just VB6, but remember all the 4GL and model driven development tools. All…

It was all about the difficulty of actually installing software on all those desktops. The web eliminated all of that.

And it was so easy for ODBC and other configs to get trampled on by users and installers running amok over existing settings.

Everyone was root on their PC in those days. The opportunity for users to screw things up accidentally was everywhere.

Re: Ask HN: Why did Visual Basic die?

#185

Post by mike_d »

nvy wrote: post #176
bonzini wrote: post #154

Earlier 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.

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.

Access was an app you had installed on your workstation but never opened because in the backend every late 90s early 2000s desktop app was using it as its data backend.

Between Excel (with no functional API to use for storage) and a "real database" (your users now need to ask IT to deploy SQLServer) was a use case of app just needs to store persistent data for a single user.

Re: Ask HN: Why did Visual Basic die?

#186

Post by shadowgovt »

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…

There was a parallel universe where VB was going to be a web scripting language.

That idea got hamstrung by two things:

1) It turns out cross-platform web compatibility was way more important than anything else, so nobody wanted to write web pages using vbscript if that meant Netscape Navigator / Firefox couldn't read them. MS wasn't willing to either let the language go into the public or subsidize developing the engine for other browsers, so the web dev space just kinda... Didn't care

2) It may have hung on as a scripting language for IE-only stacks, but the Microsoft antitrust lawsuit (and subsequent appearance of Chrome on the scene as a better enterprise browser, with its stability improvements and process sandboxing) ended that era.

Re: Ask HN: Why did Visual Basic die?

#187

Post by smitty1e »

VB lives on as Visual Basic for Applications, but you have to have MS Office to get that.

What is lacking is a compiler to make a stand-alone file. MS Access has the most robust Application object, in my experience.

Basic as such has, e.g. https://www.freebasic.net/

> What problems it had that caused them to abandon it?

My understanding is that the ActiveX goodness that makes VBA quite handy for your stand-alone needs is also a security nightmare.

Re: Ask HN: Why did Visual Basic die?

#188

Post by Philpax »

vector_spaces wrote: post #135
nottheengineer wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

"2D programming" is normally called array programming, and it's common in scientific computing, ML, and finance. It does require a different mindset, kind of similar to SQL but not exactly. See APL, K, q, NumPy, matlab, Julia, and friends for languages that embrace this paradigm

I don't think you're talking about the same thing? The parent poster is talking about Excel's ability to spread computational steps across rows and columns (i.e. the structure of the code itself), while array programming traditionally refers to writing computations over arrays (i.e. the structure of the data)
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