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Ask HN: Why did Visual Basic die?

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Re: Ask HN: Why did Visual Basic die?

#281

Post by chaostheory »

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.

A better comparison is with VB’a spiritual successor: Power Apps.

Not sure, but I think VB is still responsible for most of MS’s security threats even now. It makes sense for MS to try to EOL

Re: Ask HN: Why did Visual Basic die?

#282

Post by JohnBooty »

taeric wrote: post #275
JackMorgan wrote: post #234

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I'm deploying react to a CDN for a living, and I would have no idea how to instruct someone to "slap together a few fields and a button" and put it somewhere meaningful. As a kid, I remember making full blown D&D character sheets based on an easy Access backend. You could even print them out. I want to, but I just can't back any claim that things have gotten easier for pretty much anything. With a ton of extra power…

    I want to, but I just can't back any claim that 
    things have gotten easier for pretty much anything.
I think it's easier for a seasoned developer to spin up and deploy a "real" Djanjo/Rails/whatever app with decent table-stakes features like secure auth.

But everything else is harder.

I have zero idea how to tell a new developer to get started in the hobby/industry these days.

The real problem IMO is the absolute churning shitstorm that is front-end development. I don't know how it got so bad, so quickly, and stayed that way for so long. We as an industry are not going to be happy until it takes at least 50 toolchain steps to produce a simple "hello world."

Re: Ask HN: Why did Visual Basic die?

#283

Post by highwaylights »

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?

How much time do you have?

P-code debugging with fully rewindable edit and continue.

A one-true-way event model that was derided at the time but was really just years ahead of its time.

Minimal runtime downloads to install apps locally, which also produced tiny, performant executables.

The sweet, sweet With keyword. I know, I know. But I don’t care. Just be more aware of your namespaces.

Also (and I still don’t understand why we can’t have this in VS Code when VS had this in 1998) object combos at the top of the code file for class and method (admittedly VS proper still has this I’m just grumpy at the regression)

Re: Ask HN: Why did Visual Basic die?

#284

Post by yoava »

Visual Basic died because of the Web.

VS, and Delphi, are the masters of creating desktop applications. However, both failed to port to the web, and them to mobile.

There are a lot of reasons why they failed -

* missing graphical expression capabilities for customer facing websites

* using languages that are not native JS, preventing them from utilizing the JS eco-system

* Vendors (Google, Apple) who for their own reasons kept mobile development native on their language and tools. And many more reasons.

Last, both have paved the way for low code application builders for enterprises, which are mostly aimed at internal systems (not customer facing).

Worth noting that we, at Wix, have built the Wix dev platform learning from VB and Delphi, creating a website builder platform with similar concepts (I am the creator of Velo by Wix, the Wix dev platform, and having 10 years experience programming VB and Delphi).

Re: Ask HN: Why did Visual Basic die?

#285

Post by jimnotgym »

meredydd wrote: post #120
_f1dq wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can write HTML/CSS/JS and a few back-end languages like PHP in my sleep but there's no way I could hand-code a web app as fast as I could a desktop app in 1997 using VB. I would LOVE it if I could, though.

Have you tried https://anvil.works ? (I'm a founder!) It's quite explicitly VB-esque (only using Python), and having a single paradigm rather than stitching together several different programs speeds things up even for those who can write HTML/JS/CSS in their sleep. (And of course, you can drop out to JS/CSS/HTML if you want.) Overall I think the development speed is comparable to VB6.

Reminds me... maybe I can finally build that app I couldn't be bothered to build before...

Re: Ask HN: Why did Visual Basic die?

#286

Post by babypuncher »

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.

You may be confusing Visual Basic .NET with Visual Basic 6 and its predecessors. C# actually predates VB.NET by about a year.

VB.NET may be syntactically similar to VB6, but under the hood they were so different that migrating projects to VB.NET essentially meant a complete rewrite.

Re: Ask HN: Why did Visual Basic die?

#287

Post by throwaway5752 »

"On Error Resume Next"

I like a lot about the language, but let's not let nostalgia run away with some of the bad points. And that's not even getting into COM/OLE registry mess, or difficulty of handling c type/vb type mappings when interacting with the api. A lot of what I liked, I now like about powershell or python.

Re: Ask HN: Why did Visual Basic die?

#288

Post by JohnBooty »

daydreamtrip wrote: post #273
vb-8448 wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So true!!! :D :D :D If Excel stops working, financial institutions around the world would collapse.

Python was just added to Excel so there's not much chance of that

Really?? Oh, wow: https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/excel-blog/announcing...

Actually that's really awesome, I think.

My goal is basically to never touch Excel again. But, I have to admit - that 2D mixture of data and code called "a spreadsheet" is honestly a pretty cool programming paradigm for a lot of tasks. It can be horribly abused... but so can everything.

Re: Ask HN: Why did Visual Basic die?

#289

Post by cebert »

To be clear, Visual Basic isn’t dead. I work in the govtech space. I can assure you that there are VB6 applications still running into production in this space, even places you would not expect. VB6 doesn’t support threading, but I’ve seen Computer Aided Dispatch applications that use C++ to multi-thread VB6 server code for emergency 911 dispatch.

VB6 still runs on Windows, and will even work just fine in AWS.

Re: Ask HN: Why did Visual Basic die?

#290

Post by codeulike »

polotics wrote: post #163
codeulike wrote: post #101

People want more these days. With VB you could write a CRUD application that saved data to a database and ran some reports. But now people want the database to pull in multiple feeds from other businesses via API, people want it to be available on the web, it needs to have a self service component so the customer can also log in, at the back end the database is connected to several other systems with daily feeds comi…

VB6 could do all these things and more, in the 90's I built just the right small parts in C++ to glue things together, and we could do multi-processing, resilient multi-server setups, and much much more. Serving HTTP for some always-limiting browser was an obvious easy sidenote, ie. what your mantra "available on the web" wraps in silver, but leveraging the full power of the desktop and OS was what power users actual…

Right, you could do all that with VB but most people didn't.

Exception handling was crap in VB (no call stack) so we wrote a Visual Studio Macro that would go and edit every single method to add "On Error Goto" with a block at the end of the method to automatically add the method name to a homemade exception object so that when there was an error we could actually tell where it was coming from. So you _can_ do that too in VB but it wasn't pretty.

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