Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Ask HN: Why did Visual Basic die?

news.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

251–260 of 535 posts

Re: Ask HN: Why did Visual Basic die?

#251

Post by mdeeks »

kdmccormick wrote: post #105
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…

Lol, my first programming gig as a teenager was performing a VB6 -> VB.NET "upgrade" of a 200K sloc legacy desktop application, which obviously ended up being a total rewrite. Everything in my career since then has seemed easy in comparison.

If this was mine, I'm so sorry :) Just kidding, I actually know my VB6 code is still running in prod.

VB6 did let me learn to program very valuable utilities from scratch, with practically no programming experience. I probably owe my entire career to it and VBA. I took a C++ course once and it nearly turned me off of coding completely. VB6 saved me.

Re: Ask HN: Why did Visual Basic die?

#252

Post by anon____ »

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…

Don't forget that most of those VB apps you've seen were hacked together by amateurs, engineers, business and finance people, not professional programmers. It was great for their productivity. They automated their work, and they couldn't have done it in C.

BASIC = Beginners' All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code

Re: Ask HN: Why did Visual Basic die?

#253

Post by layer8 »

eternityforest wrote: post #158
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…

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…

It’s because Excel sheets are often used like forms to fill some fields in, with labels, and dedicated formulas in the background. And sometimes part of that form is a table, but also graphical charts etc. on the side. Excel sheets can be designed almost like in a layout program, also to be suitable for printout. People like that freeform spatial-thinking flexibility about Excel.

Re: Ask HN: Why did Visual Basic die?

#254

Post by progmetaldev »

xnx wrote: post #20

If Microsoft had put more effort into Internet Explorer and VBScript ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VBScript ), today's web could look very different, and in some ways better.

I can see where you are going with this train of thought, but Microsoft really blew it when it came to providing too much functionality to the web before having a fully formed plan. The amount of security issues was a precursor for basically every web based plugin technology that came after it (ActiveX, Java Applets, Flash/Macromedia Director, Silverlight, etc.). I'm not sure on Silverlight vulnerabilities, because I had been forced to learn ActionScript 3 with Flash, and it left a bad taste in my mouth. It's very possible that Silverlight wasn't full of security issues, and was a good technology that was just killed along with general plugin technology when Apple stopped supporting Flash.

Re: Ask HN: Why did Visual Basic die?

#255

Post by viraptor »

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…

> VB got a full rewrite into an object-oriented language and the IDE moved further away from the VB6 visual building paradigm.

What do you mean by this? Visual Studio today has a designer / code editor that works in a very similar way to VB6 that I remember. What do you think is missing?

Re: Ask HN: Why did Visual Basic die?

#256

Post by bonzini »

sebazzz wrote: post #241
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.

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.

A monthly subscription is a non starter for charities and also it needs a work or school account.

Re: Ask HN: Why did Visual Basic die?

#257

Post by ripley12 »

ethbr1 wrote: post #242
eropple wrote: post #196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 syste…

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

This doesn't make sense to me. I worked in a 50/50 VB.NET/C# codebase for years and while I don't love the VB syntax, the two languages were 99% interchangeable. Nearly anything you can do in C# you can do in VB.NET, and vice versa.

Re: Ask HN: Why did Visual Basic die?

#258

Post by lotsoweiners »

ChicagoDave wrote: post #50
Zelphyr wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Honestly, I was never a fan of Basic but I still don't understand why there isn't a GUI app builder as productive as the VB6-era tools were for any language.

Devs don’t design user interfaces anymore. There are separate disciplines for user experience, graphic design, front-end development, API development, and data storage choices. There’s no reason to have a drag and drop UI builder anymore.

You should tell my employer, state Government, this.

Re: Ask HN: Why did Visual Basic die?

#259

Post by nologic01 »

The broader question is, why did "Visual Programming" die, or rather, why is it always rather niche.

Visual type coding / low tech coding, drag and drop of computing blocks and other GUI based programming approaches is a perennial promise and brilliant examples light the sky every once in while like fireworks (Scratch, Web "Mashups" [1] come to mind as other examples).

The outline of the answer must be that the capabilities enabled with such GUI oriented programming styles don't hit a sweet spot with large numbers of less technical knowledge workers. Compare e.g., with the spreadsheet paradigm that is a resounding success despite Microsoft. But why that is is not clear.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mashup_(web_application_hybrid...

Re: Ask HN: Why did Visual Basic die?

#260

Post by [deleted] »

viraptor wrote: post #255
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…

> VB got a full rewrite into an object-oriented language and the IDE moved further away from the VB6 visual building paradigm. What do you mean by this? Visual Studio today has a designer / code editor that works in a very similar way to VB6 that I remember. What do you think is missing?

[deleted]
Post reply on HN