Visual Basic died for the same reason that Win 7 & Win 8.1 died.
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Ask HN: Why did Visual Basic die?
261–270 of 535 posts
Re: Ask HN: Why did Visual Basic die?
#262If 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.
How many incompatible languages called VB-something did Microsoft create? There's at least the classic Visual Basic, VBA, VBScript, and VB.NET. Although to be fair, the distinction between the language and libraries has never been very clear in BASIC variants.
Although not starting with VB, there's also QBASIC, as well as another BASIC dialect I believe Microsoft bought in their early days. QBASIC isn't a drastically different language than Visual Basic, VB just added graphical components.
Re: Ask HN: Why did Visual Basic die?
#263The 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…
Exactly! The little Visual Basic I saw was always and entangled, manually tested, spaghetti code mess. Devs were productive only at the start of the project and slowed down to a crawl as things got more complex.
Re: Ask HN: Why did Visual Basic die?
#264I 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…
This article was excellent, @RyLuke — I read it a few months ago when it was first published and passed it on to just about everyone I know in my MSFT network.
I cut my teeth on VB6 back in the day — for someone that didn't know much about programming at the time it felt like I suddenly had found a new set of superpowers. VB6 was a big confidence booster + momentum builder that set me on a path to a happy career.
Awesome that you were able to connect with Alan and Michael and thanks for the trip down memory lane.
Re: Ask HN: Why did Visual Basic die?
#265No fault of its own. We simply stopped building windows apps and started building for the web instead. The best web apps still pale in comparison.
Re: Ask HN: Why did Visual Basic die?
#266Earlier 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# 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?
Yes. I thought he wrote VB, not VB.NET.
Re: Ask HN: Why did Visual Basic die?
#267A few thoughts - loved VB and made my first money as a high schooler by programming in it.
As far as I can recall it was the only programming language that let you begin by laying out the UI and then wire up the code later. Like your project started up with a blank Windows window. You drag a button or a text area and you hit Run and your app right away has a window, a button and a text area.
To write code for the button click, you click the button in the editor and write it.
A few years later jBuilder (I think) allowed you to do something like with Java, that though not as simply. I am not aware of any dev tooling that offers that today.
I suspect a few things happened that made VB go away. I think VB was aimed at one-man dev, not sure how it would work with revision control and team development (eg when u think of your project as a window you drag stuff onto, how do you deal with merge diffs etc.) I also think the world migrated to more client server / web stuff around this time, while VB was very married to a standalone windows app. And then on the flip side, probably coding became stronger in excel so some of the stuff moved there.
VB was amazing, such a pleasure to create in.
Re: Ask HN: Why did Visual Basic die?
#268I've mentioned here in other occasions, but worth doing it again: GAMBAS (https://gambas.sourceforge.net/en/main.html) is a cool, modern and powerful alternative to the old good VB RAPID stuff. I haven't personally used it in ages but I recommend to give it a shot.
Re: Ask HN: Why did Visual Basic die?
#269I 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?
VB6’s concept of OOP was different. Sure the same keywords are found: Module, Sub, etc but it was rewritten to run on IL/NET VM. Fundamentally changing it from a COM compatible language to a .Net framework compatible one.
Re: Ask HN: Why did Visual Basic die?
#270The 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.
LibreOffice Base is... okay. It's not great but I was able to do most of the things I used to use Access for (simple small CRUD database tools that let you quickly build forms, simple table relationships, enter/review data, generate reports). Basically, it's better than nothing and nothing is what we've got now. Base can get pretty confusing at points and has given me a lot of head-scratchers at some times.
Even with otherwise seemingly easy-to-use web-based improvements to Excel that my employer has like smartsheet... these don't seem to let you do any sort of super basic many-to-one relationships (maybe with some expensive ad on package? dunno... and smartsheet has plastered their site with a bunch of 101 intro to databases SEO spam that explain what different types of relationships are rather than how to fucking build them with smartsheet)