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Ask HN: Why did Visual Basic die?

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Re: Ask HN: Why did Visual Basic die?

#351

Post by ksec »

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…

>The most vocal, but minority of VB users wanted more advanced functionality and a more powerful/expressive language (as is often the case).

This is the single reason why most computing tools, ( not limited to VB ) never reached wide enough audience. The nerds keep asking for complexity, but the majority actually wanted even more simplicity.

HyperCard, Delphi, VB6, Flash.

Re: Ask HN: Why did Visual Basic die?

#352

Post by harry8 »

nvy wrote: post #176
bonzini wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Equally serious question: what is the use case for Access? It's been installed on every corp workstation I've had and it's never been useful. In my experience either Excel can do it or you need a real programming language/database.

Seen a lot of screw-up by someone taking a databse export (csv or whatever) into excel to work on it, sorting but only sorting one column leading to disaster.

This is just unbelievably /common/.

Re: Ask HN: Why did Visual Basic die?

#353

Post by harry8 »

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.

10 year old you say.... office 97.

Re: Ask HN: Why did Visual Basic die?

#354

Post by harry8 »

tombert wrote: post #237
nottheengineer wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 have grown a respect for Excel in the last decade or so. It's slow, it's clunky, and it's far from perfect, but I think it's among the most approachable language out there. A lot of people using Excel, even some of the more advanced stuff like if statements and logic, don't even realize that they're writing programs, and I think that's genuinely awesome: people are able to utilize the power of programming by accide…

Gnumeric is actually a good excel. The stats routines are shared with R so if ever someone demonstrates a bug, it is fixed!

Free, fast, accurate. Pick any three!

http://gnumeric.org

Re: Ask HN: Why did Visual Basic die?

#355

Post by blincoln »

danzk wrote: post #323
babypuncher wrote: post #286

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Visual Studio had a built-in migration utility which could get you 80-90% there. However if the original VB6 was spaghetti code written without Option Strict and Option Explicit enabled you had much bigger problems. The biggest breaking change was the removal of the global Printer Object so any printing code needed a complete rewrite.

The migrated VB6 code I saw back in the era when VS2003 came out was a thin glue layer over some compiled DLLs. So the result of using the converter was a thin VB.NET wrapper around very outdated, vulnerable, unsupported third-party code.

Maybe other shops had a lot of pure VB6 code, though.

Re: Ask HN: Why did Visual Basic die?

#356

Post by harry8 »

pillefitz wrote: post #86
bmj wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can confirm this: I know several mechanical engineers that do mission critical-type systems (think "power plants"), and they routinely use Excel VBA for calculations.

And it's often the best tool for the job

Other than the known calculation bugs in excel that MS refused to fix for at least a decade and probably still 20 years later.

http://www.pages.drexel.edu/~bdm25/gnumeric.pdf

http://www.phusewiki.org/docs/2009%20PAPERS/SP06.pdf

http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1198/tas.2011.09076

Re: Ask HN: Why did Visual Basic die?

#357

Post by jamra »

radicalbyte wrote: post #217
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…

The web and the way MS handle the web killed it. Microsoft was pushing everyone towards these horrible activx components. Many moved to PHP or Adobe Flash. I was using MS Access back in the day to solve business problems - it was like a VB6 DSL focused fully on data-driven applications. It was extremely time efficient thanks to that focus - what took me days to build took a VB developer (or PHP developer) months. Tha…

In my experience, ActiveX was not what they pushed. They pushed Asp.Net Webforms which used VBScript for the template language. The ViewState monstrosity made it an awful experience. Specifically how it send way more data than needed to and from the server on each request. I shiver when I think of it.

Re: Ask HN: Why did Visual Basic die?

#358

Post by markus_zhang »

Blackthorn wrote: post #344
cstejerean wrote: post #343

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's significantly harder to put together a quick GUI application in Python than it used to be in the VB6 days. Just getting all the dependencies installed can be a pain, and then good luck trying to add another button to that app say 2 years later, chances are nothing will build anymore.

Honestly it's harder to put together a quick GUI application in anything than it was in the VB6 days. By losing VB6, we've lost a lot of power and ability to do GUI things quickly.

What's the bottleneck to build a modern VB6? Just curious.

Re: Ask HN: Why did Visual Basic die?

#359

Post by pishpash »

ripley12 wrote: post #257
ethbr1 wrote: post #242

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've worked with a ton (too many) VB programmers by virtue of the work that I do (UI automation). My experience all suggests that pure-VB (even .NET) is a treacherous dead-end, because it doesn't scale in terms of complexity and project size, and the point at which is stops scaling is often unrealized by its developers. - VB(.NET) is amazing for small, simple gadgets. - VB(.NET) is terrible for large or complex syste…

> VB(.NET) is terrible for large or complex systems. This doesn't make sense to me. I worked in a 50/50 VB.NET/C# codebase for years and while I don't love the VB syntax, the two languages were 99% interchangeable. Nearly anything you can do in C# you can do in VB.NET, and vice versa.

Lol, it doesn't scale because of the quality of the programmer, not because of the language. There may be some self-selection there but it isn't because of the language or tooling. Any "too easy" language brings these comments. People complain about MATLAB too when in fact there is nothing wrong with it or VB. Of course you can abuse both for purposes they are not meant for.

Re: Ask HN: Why did Visual Basic die?

#360

Post by pishpash »

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…

All the consumer products were killed, like Encarta, games, Microsoft home stuff. MS went full enterprise.
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