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Ask HN: Why did Visual Basic die?

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Re: Ask HN: Why did Visual Basic die?

#211

Post by mikewarot »

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…

Excel is a quite powerful mix of declarative programming (formulas in cells), and imperative programming (VBA procedures, event triggers, etc). If you're not ready for it, it'll break your brain.

The main danger in Excel is that any area of a sheet can be treated as a pseudo table.... except it really isn't, and you can inadvertently sort some fields, while leaving the others alone, effectively scrambling your data.

Re: Ask HN: Why did Visual Basic die?

#212

Post by yc-kraln »

JackMorgan wrote: post #193

The productivity wasn't really that good. Rose tinted glasses. All the VB apps I've seen (and still get paid to maintain/rewrite to this day in the finance world) are an order of magnitude simpler than even a simple modern website. They often only have a few users, no devops automation, no deployment automation, terrible logging, terrible instrumentation, no tests, unacceptable access control, tons of failure edge ca…

I was with you until "... so is writing a React frontend".

No. No it's not. Making a functional UI in visual basic is childs play compared to the absolute cesspit of NIH and feature treadmill that frontend web development has become.

You are gatekeeping with strawmen.

Re: Ask HN: Why did Visual Basic die?

#214

Post by mikewarot »

nottheengineer wrote: post #192
eternityforest wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 i…

When doing calculations on paper, you can write your interim results anywhere. That's what excel copies. It's also why text in excel files will gladly overflow into adjacent cells.

The overflowing text isn't actually stored in the adjacent cells, it's just displayed on top of them. The difference is important.

Re: Ask HN: Why did Visual Basic die?

#215

Post by jkaplowitz »

afavour wrote: post #177
LeifCarrotson wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> It's a real shame Access died, now there's no path from a spreadsheet to something more sensible.

Although it has certainly died in terms of mindshare, it's officially still supported for PC (not Mac):

https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/access

I actually have it installed right now, because it comes with Microsoft 365 Family, which I have on the Windows PC on which I'm typing this comment. I haven't used the modern version of it, though.

Re: Ask HN: Why did Visual Basic die?

#216

Post by wild_egg »

chasil wrote: post #194
LeifCarrotson wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

...it's fantastic if you are able to live within its limitations, primarily being a single writer. If your application grows into the need for concurrent writes, then it will be time for another database.

You may be surprised at how far you need to grow to truly need concurrent writes. Blazing fast sequential writes is good enough for the vast majority of applications

Re: Ask HN: Why did Visual Basic die?

#217

Post by radicalbyte »

RyLuke wrote: post #200

I actually wrote a long article on this [1]—and had a chance to interview some of the team that built the original version of VB that was sold to Microsoft. (Alan Cooper and Michael Geary; Michael actually frequents HN pretty regularly!) My opinion is that it was a confluence of a few factors: - Microsoft was very worried about the threat of Java/Sun, and rotated hard into .NET and the common language runtime as a re…

The web and the way MS handle the web killed it. Microsoft was pushing everyone towards these horrible activx components. Many moved to PHP or Adobe Flash.

I was using MS Access back in the day to solve business problems - it was like a VB6 DSL focused fully on data-driven applications. It was extremely time efficient thanks to that focus - what took me days to build took a VB developer (or PHP developer) months. That died thanks to web (and the web version being horrific and a dataleak waiting to happen).

The move to C# and the path they've followed since then was, looking back, the way to go. I only wish that they had done more to make the experience for native programmers better out of the box.

Re: Ask HN: Why did Visual Basic die?

#218

Post by jkaplowitz »

mikewarot wrote: post #203
nvy wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 allowed maintained "relations" between tables, so you didn't need any code to have a master/detail relationship between tables, it just handled it all. This carried over to forms, queries, reports, etc. You could have a system with data entry, master/detail records, queries and reports built in a day, all without ever doing any SQL. Through ODBC, you could connect to pretty much any database around. I think Of…

Past tense? For PC users (not Mac), it's still supported and included with Microsoft 365.

Re: Ask HN: Why did Visual Basic die?

#220

Post by bluehatbrit »

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.

I know of small companies and charities that would use Access as their homegrown CRM back in the 2000's. It worked really well, you just needed one guy who'd be willing to set it up and they'd be good to go with the basic forms for a couple of years usually.

It's definetely not great by todays standards when it comes to backups and what not, but it was really fantastic at the time.

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