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Ask HN: Why did Visual Basic die?

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Re: Ask HN: Why did Visual Basic die?

#231

Post by davidthewatson »

I was working in C++ on OS/2 at the time when a resource editor was hard to find and that chasm from the command line to the GUI was what made the jump to commercial software development feel like the Khumbu Icefall.

I worked in a small software development sub at a big bank and they needed a rolodex. I agreed to do it in my spare time if they'd buy me a legal copy of VB 1.0. I did the prototype in what feels like a glacial week today, but they followed through with lunch and a shrink wrap copy.

If there's a death of GUI or IDE development tools it's the same for all of them with the possible exception of the outer edge of Jet Brains and VSCode. Put simply, they don't scale like command line tools since you're dragging a 200 ton freight train of GUI bloat behind you where it doesn't deliver the impact gravity that the train does.

HCI or GUI should scale like APIs do, but they don't, particularly now that resource editors are everywhere, and we're about to replace highly paid drag and drop mouse typists with nearly autonomous agents.

Humans benefit from visual affordances like VB because VB lowers the bar, or the barrier to entry. GUI development would still be stuck in the late 80's if Cooper hadn't made it possible for the inmates to overtake the asylum with their drag and drop tools.

Re: Ask HN: Why did Visual Basic die?

#232

Post by j45 »

TrackerFF wrote: post #151
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, turn…

VB is not VBA, VBA was a relatively small subset.

I might be mistaken but wasn't VBA brought into Excel as a familiar element from the VB world?

It is true though that some of the more purer or more initial concepts of VB likely live on in the VBA subsets of Excel.

And Access.

Re: Ask HN: Why did Visual Basic die?

#233

Post by progmetaldev »

unregistereddev wrote: post #77
beardyw wrote: post #57

I feel as if I remember using a VB compiler back in the late 80s. Am a hallucinating?

VB was first released in 1991. If you're certain that you remember it from the late 80's, then you may be thinking of QBASIC. I first learned to write code in QBASIC running on MS-DOS.

I had a computer graphics class that used QBASIC around 1994. It was probably already outdated, but switching graphics modes and making sprites animate was actually easier then than what you find now. I'm certain it's because there is so much more you can do now, but that feeling was exciting! I actually had my first computer graphics class on an Apple IIe in 1993, and that was definitely outdated at that time. I built a fish bowl with waving seaweed and a fish that would swim to the right and reappear on the left.

Re: Ask HN: Why did Visual Basic die?

#234

Post by JackMorgan »

yc-kraln wrote: post #212
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.

I was trying to compare like for like on features. Slapping together a few fields and a button in react and posting the results to an unauthorized endpoint doesn't feel any more difficult to me than the same in VB.

However, it's certainly an order of magnitude more complex to use react with all the features expected of modern development with design systems, auth/z, logging, monitoring, etc.

Re: Ask HN: Why did Visual Basic die?

#235

Post by Joel_Mckay »

The DAO and OLE Automation was a paradigm that saturated the market with similar applications, and the move to mobile/cloud platforms essentially made the computational overhead a liability. Yet in a way Microsoft VB helped standardize the look of event driven GUI workflows (also why windows 11 design sucks).

VB "made simple things easy, and difficult things impossible" in a developer environment. Its funny that the ecosystem of OCX still haunts many projects.

It could be Python took over the role of an introductory language. =)

Re: Ask HN: Why did Visual Basic die?

#236

Post by jiggawatts »

Speaking of nostalgia and Microsoft deprecating great low-code development tools…

I miss Access Data Projects.

These had the Access front end and VB rapid app development experience, but were backed (only) by SQL Server. This mode wasn’t the classic ODBC external table connector. If you added a table in Access, it would create a table in SQL. If you created columns, foreign keys, or views, the changes would be made directly to the database schema.

This also eliminated the data corruption issues that plagued file-based databases.

It truly was one of the fastest and best ways to write an internal-use business app.

So of course, Microsoft took it out to the back and quietly drowned it in a tub.

Re: Ask HN: Why did Visual Basic die?

#237

Post by tombert »

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…

I have grown a respect for Excel in the last decade or so. It's slow, it's clunky, and it's far from perfect, but I think it's among the most approachable language out there.

A lot of people using Excel, even some of the more advanced stuff like if statements and logic, don't even realize that they're writing programs, and I think that's genuinely awesome: people are able to utilize the power of programming by accident.

I still use spreadsheets all the time for small number crunchy things, just due to how it's "reactive by default". I find it's actually really useful to immediately see everything update after changing a value. Admittedly, I mostly use Google Sheets nowadays simply because it's "good enough" and much easier to share with friends. Could I write a program to do all that number crunching that performs better? Obviously yes, I could start a new Julia project and mop the floor with Excel or Google Sheets in regards to saving cycles, but that would take me 20x longer and I'd lose all the nice features of a spreadsheet.

Granted, this is coming from a strictly Anglo-American perspective; I cannot speak to Excel's ability to use other languages.

Re: Ask HN: Why did Visual Basic die?

#238

Post by kibibu »

jenscow wrote: post #223
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…

You should think about what the alternative was at the time: Mostly C/C++ VB6 you would have connected to the db by the end of the day. C/C++ you're still trying to handle WM_ERASEBKGND

Well you'd probably be using MFC which handled most of the windows messages.

Or wasting time figuring out whether you should switch to ATL

Re: Ask HN: Why did Visual Basic die?

#239

Post by michaelteter »

Despite being dead, I suspect there are a large number of very high value Excel workbooks with significant lines of VB(A) in them.

I've experienced 9 digit ventures which fully depended on large (hundreds of MB) Excel workbooks which talked to dbs, remote APIs, and network files to make complex calculations. It's invisible to most of the world, but it's definitely there and alive.

Re: Ask HN: Why did Visual Basic die?

#240

Post by TedDoesntTalk »

madrox wrote: post #143
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 p…

> As someone who was writing Visual Basic.NET back when it came out, there was no upside to it over writing in C#

Sure there was: C# didn't exist yet. It didn't exist for many years to come. It simply wasn't an option. C/C++ was, however.

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