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Ask HN: Why did Visual Basic die?

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Re: Ask HN: Why did Visual Basic die?

#291

Post by mikewarot »

jkaplowitz wrote: post #218
mikewarot wrote: post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Access allowed maintained "relations" between tables, so you didn't need any code to have a master/detail relationship between tables, it just handled it all. This carried over to forms, queries, reports, etc. You could have a system with data entry, master/detail records, queries and reports built in a day, all without ever doing any SQL. Through ODBC, you could connect to pretty much any database around. I think Of…

Past tense? For PC users (not Mac), it's still supported and included with Microsoft 365.

I don't have Office 365 any more... so I wasn't sure... Microsoft seems to slowly be killing functionality in everything, so I couldn't be sure.

Also, things went downhill when they got rid of full menus and introduced the accursed "ribbon".

Re: Ask HN: Why did Visual Basic die?

#292

Post by viraptor »

highwaylights wrote: post #283
viraptor wrote: post #255

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 under…

> The sweet, sweet With keyword.

VB.net supports With though?

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

.net framework 2.7 is guaranteed to be installed by default these days so you can deploy one exe without shipping your own runtime. Yes, officially you shouldn't, but there's so much stuff that depends on it now.

Re: Ask HN: Why did Visual Basic die?

#293

Post by taeric »

JohnBooty wrote: post #282
taeric wrote: post #275

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 chur…

Getting a rails app up and running used to be somewhat easy. You did have to ssh into a machine, but that wasn't that complicated, all told. Comparable to standing up a BBS way back in the day. Restated, if you could have a machine that was dedicated to the serving of something, it wasn't that hard back in the day.

To that end, I suspect telling people to just stand up a node server is where to start hobbyists off? Still very complicated with the division between front and backend that is difficult to see for new folks.

And I fully agree on the ridiculous churn. Having zero stability in documentation and how to do things has been terrible for our industry. What we have gained in better ways seems to mostly be lost in all of the previous ways that used to work.

Re: Ask HN: Why did Visual Basic die?

#294

Post by JohnBooty »

oweiler wrote: post #263
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…

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.

    Devs were productive only at the start of the 
    project and slowed down to a crawl as things got 
    more complex.
...and as your productivity declined, your manager thought you were a dolt or perhaps had some kind of drug problem that was interfering with your work.

Because he saw how easy productivity was at the start ("look! you just draw a button with your mouse!") and couldn't understand why it quickly became a nightmare.

Re: Ask HN: Why did Visual Basic die?

#295

Post by analog31 »

emodendroket wrote: post #278
viraptor wrote: post #255

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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?

A lot of people who wrote VB weren’t serious/professional programmers and VB.NET was too complex for them. For the serious programmer group, the stink of “VB” tainted it right out of the gate (despite having complete feature parity for a long time VB.NET jobs always paid notably less than C# ones). So it was kind of a compromise that satisfied nobody.

That was me. I wrote what I affectionately call "crapware," which are small apps that solve a problem but are not intended for use at scale. There was a lot of this stuff, such as little database queries, or hacking together a few industrial sensors with a crude display. Businesses ran on crapware. Maybe they still do. A few thousand lines of code that I wrote for a manufacturing fixture ran bug-free for more than a decade.

I remember that just downloading and installing VB.NET was burdensome, especially in the plant where many of the computers were not networked.

When VB.NET came out, programmers hung on to their VB6 disks, and kept using it for easily another decade. By the time VB6 really reached the end of the road, its replacements (e.g., Python for me) were up to speed, and free.

Re: Ask HN: Why did Visual Basic die?

#296

Post by jaylittle »

JohnBooty wrote: post #282
taeric wrote: post #275

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 chur…

A-fucking-men!

Re: Ask HN: Why did Visual Basic die?

#297

Post by eternityforest »

layer8 wrote: post #253
eternityforest wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It's amazing as a layout program for sure, as long as you're not going to interact with it much on mobile.

Then it's pretty bad but still better than writing some custom software like people would probably do without it.

Re: Ask HN: Why did Visual Basic die?

#298

Post by wvenable »

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…

If Microsoft had simply ported Visual Basic in a compatible way to .NET history would have been very different. What's the point of the common language runtime when all the common languages are just reskinned C#?

This was a major missed opportunity for Microsoft -- if they had brought Visual Basic proper in .NET it would have given hundreds of thousands of applications a smooth upgrade path into modern development. It also would have given the entire Office suite an upgrade path from VBA to .NET -- something they've still not managed.

To this day, our office still has one critical commercial 3rd party application written in Visual Basic. It's replacement is, of course, a web app written in .NET.

Re: Ask HN: Why did Visual Basic die?

#300

Post by jacquesm »

analog31 wrote: post #295
emodendroket wrote: post #278

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A lot of people who wrote VB weren’t serious/professional programmers and VB.NET was too complex for them. For the serious programmer group, the stink of “VB” tainted it right out of the gate (despite having complete feature parity for a long time VB.NET jobs always paid notably less than C# ones). So it was kind of a compromise that satisfied nobody.

That was me. I wrote what I affectionately call "crapware," which are small apps that solve a problem but are not intended for use at scale. There was a lot of this stuff, such as little database queries, or hacking together a few industrial sensors with a crude display. Businesses ran on crapware. Maybe they still do. A few thousand lines of code that I wrote for a manufacturing fixture ran bug-free for more than a…

I came across such a project recently built using FileMaker in 2001 or so. On the original hardware, no less.
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