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Ask HN: Why did Visual Basic die?

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Re: Ask HN: Why did Visual Basic die?

#331

Post by emodendroket »

SamuelAdams wrote: post #309
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.

I think today python fills that void - people who are not serious programmers but need to put something together. Think academics, data analysts, etc. And since Python is cross platform and easy to get started with it is a lot more attractive than VB.

Python is also more palatable to professional developers than VB ever was.

Re: Ask HN: Why did Visual Basic die?

#332

Post by thread_id »

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 and the Web: The VB model for rendering Web pages was Active Server Pages and Server side rendering. Very similar to Java Server Pages. Which was still better than PHP but the IDE did not have a community version and php was easier to get started and was being taught in college curriculum.

IE having so much browser market also killed anything MS because they always tried to create their own standards which nobody wanted to follow. The client side was so difficult to script with having to test which browser and accomodate quirks mode. Another unforced error. Corporate adopters are still trying sunset critical apps which only run in IE or Edge with IE mode turned on.

Re: Ask HN: Why did Visual Basic die?

#333

Post by failuser »

dghlsakjg wrote: post #30

I think for a lot of purposes, the internet kind of took over. VB was great if you needed to do something limited to a single machine. These days, we want data to be available across machines which requires using a network, and the default network is the internet. If I'm going to be using the internet anyway, I can knock up something in HTML + JS + firebase/whatever data store, and have an application that works on a…

HTML, CSS and JS are not the best pieces of technology, otherwise there would not have been a whole industry of tools that allowed you not to touch them with a ten-foot pole. But we are stuck with them at least for a while.

Re: Ask HN: Why did Visual Basic die?

#334

Post by protocolture »

davidmurdoch wrote: post #39
mamonster wrote: post #8

Does VBA for Excel count? Because if it does then VBA for Excel has reached the"nuclear resistant cockroach" level in finance. You wouldn't believe what sort of processes in very big banks/financial institutions are built using 10 year old VBA macros. In fact, VBA consulting for finance is a very juicy cottage industry at least in Europe to this very day.

I know of a restaurant franchisee with 170+ locations that uses a home grown ERP system built in VBA on top of Access by an accountant about 20 years ago. I once had to update it to optimize (minimize) front-line staff working hours so the company didn't have to pay health insurance for those employees. A real nightmare of a task in more ways than one!

In high school I got a gig rebuilding a pre 2000 Access DB + VBA front end in office 2003ish due to some kind of incompatibility that was preventing them from upgrading their PC's.

It was a chemical safety database. It was used to identify chemical risks and track the storage of the chemicals.

I pray near daily that someone else came along years later and rebuilt it in a modern language.

Re: Ask HN: Why did Visual Basic die?

#335

Post by mamcx »

Tao3300 wrote: post #308
mamcx wrote: post #134

The 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…

Jesus Christ, not FoxPro. I briefly worked for a company whose main product had been a FoxPro application that they rewrote piece by piece in C#, reimplementing various FoxPro idioms as they went. It was a nightmare and no one knew what any of it did. One "senior" developer tearfully argued with me during a code review that even fixing comments could have dire consequences. I suspect that someone higher up liked it t…

Well, no programing language is good for data applications as is FoxPro (certainly not C#), and is terrible to writer LANG-a in LANG-b.

So sorry for you to get the worst of both worlds!

P.D: I do a port from a Fox app using idiomatic C#, like 10-30x the size of it, but well it was idiomatic!

Re: Ask HN: Why did Visual Basic die?

#336

Post by davidmurdoch »

protocolture wrote: post #334
davidmurdoch wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I know of a restaurant franchisee with 170+ locations that uses a home grown ERP system built in VBA on top of Access by an accountant about 20 years ago. I once had to update it to optimize (minimize) front-line staff working hours so the company didn't have to pay health insurance for those employees. A real nightmare of a task in more ways than one!

In high school I got a gig rebuilding a pre 2000 Access DB + VBA front end in office 2003ish due to some kind of incompatibility that was preventing them from upgrading their PC's. It was a chemical safety database. It was used to identify chemical risks and track the storage of the chemicals. I pray near daily that someone else came along years later and rebuilt it in a modern language.

Ah yes, where testing just means "I hit save on the live database file and didn't received an angry call from accounting 2 minutes later"

Re: Ask HN: Why did Visual Basic die?

#337

Post by mamcx »

bonzini wrote: post #154
mamcx wrote: post #134

The 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.

> what is a good alternative to Access (or Fox, I add)

Nothing.

Access is(was) in fact a worse alternative to Fox:

- Much worse DB engine, and that is saying a lot (FoxPro db can and get corrupted. A typical functionality that was added to any fox codebase was a utility to fix it)

- MUCH MUCH worse programming language (VB) that is neither good as-is, much less as a data-programing language.

Fox/dbase is the only data-oriented language that was relatively popular and fit for the use-case.

This is by a mile the main point: Is a desert looking for languages that are made for business app/data oriented programing (and much harder looking for something not weird).

The main options: Fox/dBase/Informix(? not remember), kdb+, Cobol, SQL(when extended as store procedure lang with loops and that)

--

This point is big. Having a good form builder (that is already rare) is not enough to be a real contender for this space. You need a language where making queries is truly nice.

In short, you need a language that is `LINQ/Relational` as first-class end-to-end.

- If this lang needs an ORM: FAIL.

- If this lang needs to compose strings to make a query: FAIL.

- If exist "impedance mismatch" between data manipulation/queries and the rest of the lang: FAIL.

- It should also support super-advanced types like date, decimal, currency and ideally dimensional units. Ideally algebraic types as today.

- It should have a version of Rust `serde, Into/From` traits, for easy conversion between data + formats.

- It should look "normal" like python/swift with `LINQ` queries.

This is the lang I trying to build: https://tablam.org

Re: Ask HN: Why did Visual Basic die?

#338

Post by MichaelZuo »

emodendroket wrote: post #317
MichaelZuo wrote: post #315

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I don't get the relation here?, most businesses care somewhat, and certainly the better run businesses do quite a bit, so they'll make sure to record down everything important about the software.

Re: Ask HN: Why did Visual Basic die?

#339

Post by jopsen »

emodendroket wrote: post #317
MichaelZuo wrote: post #315

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> The issue is that a lot of times businesses outgrow their bespoke Access app or whatever... > Of course if that never happens it’s great..

It could also be argued that outgrowing your initial business app is good thing.

Lots of business don't outgrow it, because they don't grow :)

Indeed, it might be reasonable not to invest too much upfront, before you have scale and can afford to build stuff you won't outgrow.

Re: Ask HN: Why did Visual Basic die?

#340

Post by trimethylpurine »

nottheengineer wrote: post #38
mamonster wrote: post #8

Does VBA for Excel count? Because if it does then VBA for Excel has reached the"nuclear resistant cockroach" level in finance. You wouldn't believe what sort of processes in very big banks/financial institutions are built using 10 year old VBA macros. In fact, VBA consulting for finance is a very juicy cottage industry at least in Europe to this very day.

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…

I can't understand why so many finance people won't just learn SQL.
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