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Ask HN: Why did Visual Basic die?

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Re: Ask HN: Why did Visual Basic die?

#241

Post by sebazzz »

bonzini wrote: post #154
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.

PowerApps probably, and with the transition to the cloud Microsoft will probably not invest too much into stuff that can't run well in a web browser and mobile app.

Re: Ask HN: Why did Visual Basic die?

#242

Post by ethbr1 »

eropple wrote: post #196
mike_d wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 concept…

While maybe that's true, that doesn't map to my experience very well. After QBasic, I wrote a lot of Visual Basic 5 and 6. I had poked at C, but would not say I knew it, and had never done anything useful in the language. But I did exactly one thing in VB.NET before trying C# and realizing that it really did encapsulate and present a better way to think about code. It's not perfect, but it's much, much better--and in…

I've worked with a ton (too many) VB programmers by virtue of the work that I do (UI automation).

My experience all suggests that pure-VB (even .NET) is a treacherous dead-end, because it doesn't scale in terms of complexity and project size, and the point at which is stops scaling is often unrealized by its developers.

- VB(.NET) is amazing for small, simple gadgets.

- VB(.NET) is terrible for large or complex systems.

The problem is that VB is likely to be the only programming language that developer knows (moreso than developers in other languages).

Consequently, when they reach the end of the reasonable VB road... they will NOT say "Oh, I should learn C#."

They will say "How can I make this work in VB?"

And that's when you start to get business-ending unsupportable messes of spaghetti code that just barely work, on a good day.

Give a person only a hammer, and they'll find a way to make the entire world a nail.

Re: Ask HN: Why did Visual Basic die?

#243

Post by CrimsonCape »

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 used it to create a detailed opinion of cost with recursive summing, so that item costs were summed per section, section costs summed into summary costs, summary costs summed into project cost.

No other document designer that I'm aware of allows for runtime integration of variables into the layout/presentation.

Re: Ask HN: Why did Visual Basic die?

#244

Post by tombert »

dauertewigkeit wrote: post #41
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.

My brother is a mechanical engineer and apparently, there's lots of Excel VBA in traditional industries as well.

My dad works in Aerospace (though admittedly more on the managerial side, but he still tries to stay technical), and he does all of his initial programming in Excel first, and then will port it over to Matlab if he needs something more code-like.

I've been trying to get him to use Julia for that second step since I absolutely hate Matlab, but I honestly don't fault him for using Excel in the initial phase.

Re: Ask HN: Why did Visual Basic die?

#245

Post by progmetaldev »

Pxtl wrote: post #34

DotNet is meant to be the replacement. The big problem though is that MS keeps failing to make a GUI framework that is quick-and-easy as VB forms were. Winforms still exists, and it's only a bit clumsier than VB forms, but it's very old and not modern. The more modern .NET gui-frameworks are much less user-friendly. Linguistically, I think the successor to VB is Powershell. It's the same mashup of inconsistent flags…

For a while there we had WebForms, which was used much like WinForms, but generated the controls in HTML, CSS, and JS. That technology was very much not fun to work with, for the few projects I used it on. I built a full website using Sitecore CMS back when it was fully WebForms, and having come from PHP for web development, it was painful. It tried to paste over the way the web worked, which would have been fine had I never touched web development. Once ASP.NET MVC was introduced, things got much better for .NET developers.

I actually learned VB6 alongside Java in school, so migrating to VB.NET was fairly easy for me, but once I saw C# I jumped ship immediately. I turned my existing VB.NET code into DLL files and called them from C# from that point forward.

Re: Ask HN: Why did Visual Basic die?

#246

Post by layer8 »

bonzini wrote: post #154
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.

There is no good alternative, really.

Re: Ask HN: Why did Visual Basic die?

#247

Post by eropple »

TedDoesntTalk wrote: post #240
madrox wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

VB.NET and C# were released concurrently, weren't they?

Re: Ask HN: Why did Visual Basic die?

#248

Post by swasheck »

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…

I wrote Dts package scripts in Vbs but had primarily used C# for application development. When Ssis came out with Sql Server 2015, they only released Vb.Net for scripting components. It wasn't a natural transition from Vbs -> Vb.Net so we ended up writing libraries in C# and using those in Vb.Net. Brutal.

Re: Ask HN: Why did Visual Basic die?

#249

Post by progmetaldev »

mattl wrote: post #2

There's still Visual Basic .NET, is it much different productivity wise? I assume the language has changed enough from classic VB.

While it is vastly different from VB6, I found that knowing VB6 at least gave me a leg up on understanding what they were going for. Once I was familiar with Visual Basic .NET, I realized how much less syntax was involved with C#, while still being able to use the same libraries. I never looked back, except for my first professional job where my "lead" didn't know C# very well, but knew VB.NET. He made me code in VB.NET, but eventually I took over the project, then immediately extracted the VB.NET code into DLL files that I called from C#, and wrote the remaining application in C# until I could refactor everything into C#.

Re: Ask HN: Why did Visual Basic die?

#250

Post by oaiey »

TylerE wrote: post #70
oaiey wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Good explanation. Hobbiest switched. Because IIS and Asp.net run very well with VB.NET. but who could afford that compared to PHP.

The bigger pain point, from memory, was having an ODBC-compliant driver so the OS could actually talk to your DB. That basically meant MSSQL if you wanted to co-exist happily with early dotnet.

Databases access was a mess then in general. But yeah, completely agree with your sentiment. PHP was just so much easier with common databases.
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