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Ask HN: Why did Visual Basic die?

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Re: Ask HN: Why did Visual Basic die?

#311

Post by datavirtue »

Flowzone wrote: post #191
datavirtue wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is a book called: Professional Excel Development. If you want to get into it. You could probably use that book to build an OS in Excel. I'm not joking.

This sounds like it would be right up my alley. I'm not a professional developer of any kind but have done hobby coding on/off for years, and I'm better at excel than the average user. Currently working for a consulting company with a whole region's health system as the client. They use excel for lots, but it's all very basic stuff. I had one of my team members spend an hour whipping up an excel form for them that au…

Make sure you build subs (functions/methods) for everything....I mean everything. Break all of your code into the smallest subs possible with clear names. Otherwise you will not be able to make heads or tails of your own code in a few months. I built a fairly sophisticated VBA project and left it for a few months, came back and was pulling my hair out. I had to refactor before I could move on, and it was very painful. After the refactor I could make changes and modify it without issue. You have to be, what seems like, over-granular. Its just "clean code" principles: the name of the sub should describe exactly what it does. If the name is too big...break stuff out into different subs.

Excel is perfect for building proof-of-concept apps and Microsoft has a cloud offering called PowerApps that use a somewhat similar "Excel concept." I have built a significant app in PowerApps...not recommended. If you don't have a development team Excel is good. Same for PowerApps. Very painful if they get big. Keep things simple.

Re: Ask HN: Why did Visual Basic die?

#312

Post by MichaelMoser123 »

bmitc wrote: post #76

I think the answer is: because Microsoft let it. I'm a big fan of modern .NET, but my biggest complaint is that Microsoft views, and always has, the CLR as the C# Language Runtime and not the Common Language Runtime. For example, see the relationship between F# and C#. The CLR is constantly getting features that are only to support features in C#, leaving F# in a position where they either don't get the feature, can'…

>The other thing is that C# consistently adds features to itself that are inspired by F#, since F# already implements these features on the CLR, thus showing their viability. So what happens is that C# continually approaches a more bloated language with a subset of it being a poor copy of F#

C# and F# sometimes remind me another pair of languages: Java and Scala.

Re: Ask HN: Why did Visual Basic die?

#313

Post by Tao3300 »

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.

My favorite VB6 moment was as an intern. I opened a project that lived on a shared drive that wasn't in source control. Visual Studio popped up a dialog warning that I didn't have the proper license on my PC for the parts of the app that interfaced with Excel. Then it cheerfully deleted the offending project files and sections of code and saved it. On the shared drive.

Re: Ask HN: Why did Visual Basic die?

#314

Post by timdietrich »

For anyone looking for a modern alternative to Visual Basic, you might want to take a look at Xojo.

Xojo's a rapid application development platform (both a language and an IDE) that you can use to develop desktop apps (for macOS, Windows, Linux), Web apps, mobile apps (for iOS and Android), as well as console apps. It's been around for more than 20 years, and some of you might remember it from back when it was called REALbasic.

I'm a solo custom software developer that specializes in NetSuite, and I'm using Xojo to develop all kinds of apps that integrate with NetSuite - from desktop apps to mobile apps to Web APIs.

There's a blog post on Xojo's site that provides a good summary of how Xojo is both similar to and different from VB. It's an older post (from 2013), and Xojo's come a long way since then.

https://xojo.com

http://blog.xojo.com/2013/06/19/a-modern-alternative-to-visu...

Re: Ask HN: Why did Visual Basic die?

#315

Post by MichaelZuo »

ta1243 wrote: post #303
analog31 wrote: post #295

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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've written a lot of crapware, still keeps my employer working 15+ years on. Meanwhile "replacement" systems have come and gone, but the users still keep using the crapware. 1) See a business problem 2) Put something together to solve the problem 3) Move On

I was going to say, a few thousands lines of code that reliably solves a real business problem for over a decade is pretty much the exact opposite of 'crapware'...

Re: Ask HN: Why did Visual Basic die?

#317

Post by emodendroket »

MichaelZuo wrote: post #315
ta1243 wrote: post #303

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've written a lot of crapware, still keeps my employer working 15+ years on. Meanwhile "replacement" systems have come and gone, but the users still keep using the crapware. 1) See a business problem 2) Put something together to solve the problem 3) Move On

I was going to say, a few thousands lines of code that reliably solves a real business problem for over a decade is pretty much the exact opposite of 'crapware'...

As long as you don’t care about stuff like maintainability or logging sure. The issue is that a lot of times businesses outgrow their bespoke Access app or whatever and then it’s a huge headache to untangle the reliance on it and go more robust. Of course if that never happens it’s great and frees up developers’ time for higher-value work.

Re: Ask HN: Why did Visual Basic die?

#318

Post by pcdoodle »

VB6 allowed me to write apps "On Site". I'm talking crazy stuff like a customer asked for a personal phone call when the apartment building maintenance room door was opened:

1 Google VB6 LPT READ (Run a wire from alarm panel to LPT port pins) 2 Google VB6 Modem Dial (Hardcode customers cell phone and add exe to startup folder) 3 Bill the customer for 30 minutes of "software development".

I've never been more productive than with VB6 and sample code of the web. I do not write software for a living and the lack of tools like it are a real bummer.

Re: Ask HN: Why did Visual Basic die?

#319

Post by taeric »

hombre_fatal wrote: post #307
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…

On the other hand, I never understood how to build anything with Access despite having a book on it as a teen. Web tech, even in its early forms, was much more obvious to me and I could run code in the browser's web console. I could find JS snippets online, paste them into index.html, and open the page. I found VB/Access far more confusing than that. These days I help beginners pick up web dev and I think HNers overe…

Access was the hard part of those things. Using a form builder to get a basic form up and build some interactions, though, was trivial back in the day.

Were there complications? Of course there were. Would I recommend some of those practices to build something? Not necessarily. But I can't get behind any claims that we made any progress on making things easier for hobby programs.

Closest we have to that, would be the scratch programs my kids have been making.

Hilariously, the best thing for making games and similar ideas that my kids would have, is going to be Mario Maker. By a long shot.

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