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Ask HN: Why did Visual Basic die?

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Re: Ask HN: Why did Visual Basic die?

#361

Post by eastern »

LeifCarrotson wrote: post #170
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.

SQLite. It's not close in terms of ease-of-use of the GUI administration and forms, but as a single-server database solution to embed into a line-of-business app it's fantastic.

This is so true.

A cross platform Access-like front-end that used sqlite as the data storage engine would conqueror large parts the territory.

Re: Ask HN: Why did Visual Basic die?

#364

Post by wmidwestranger »

I'm curious if I should have been more kind to Visual Basic because I went with C# and I'm still in love with Ruby. There doesn't need to be a barrier to more powerful and efficient coding, as far as I can see. Even when the technology allows expression, the human element is usually the barrier.

Re: Ask HN: Why did Visual Basic die?

#365

Post by sn_master »

Microsoft stopped supporting it. VB 6 was the last "true" Visual Basic. The .Net Visual Basic was not backwards compatible with the very large code base projects everyone had created over the years and ones on forums and websites like planet-source-code (before GitHub existed) and the many, many beginner-friendly books.

They had a conversion wizard to migrate VB 6 projects to VB.Net but it was very half hearted and never worked on anything except the very trivial code bases. Anything that used OCX and you were out of luck, except OCXs were very very common in classic VB development.

People kept writing VB6 as long as it was practical (Windows 7) and then either moved on to greener pastures or left coding altogether as it was becoming impossible to use modern libraries anymore and the overall learning paradigm have shifted from books/forums into video tutorials and "modern" languages.

Re: Ask HN: Why did Visual Basic die?

#366

Post by eastern »

wiz21c wrote: post #90
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…

> Us mortal developers who can only put lines below one another At least my spaghetti code goes into one direction only...

Yes, but I bet your code cannot reveal its own spaghetti:-)

Excel has long had an option to display 'precedent' and 'dependent' cells.

You can actually see the spaghetti right there.

https://support.microsoft.com/en-au/office/display-the-relat...

Re: Ask HN: Why did Visual Basic die?

#367

Post by sn_master »

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…

Also, most machines did not have the .Net framework installed, and back then it was 20 MB download which was gonna take ~2 hours on dial up back in the day vs MSVMVM6.dll which was on all Windows versions from 98 until 7 at least.

Re: Ask HN: Why did Visual Basic die?

#368

Post by sn_master »

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.

WinForms in C# was pretty decent tbh. Not so sure about WCF/Metro/Modern and whatever it is now that Microsoft been releasing. They just stopped caring about consistent UI for apps on Windows altogether since ~2010 or so.

Re: Ask HN: Why did Visual Basic die?

#369

Post by sn_master »

viraptor wrote: post #292
highwaylights wrote: post #283

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> .net framework 2.7 is guaranteed to be installed by default these days

Yes, but that wasn't the case back in the mid-2000s when VB6 was dying and no one wanted to migrate to VB.Net

Re: Ask HN: Why did Visual Basic die?

#370

Post by fuzztester »

fuzztester wrote: post #190

Just partly on topic: the code name for the first version of Visual Basic (or its predecessor) was Ruby, IIRC, as recounted by Alan Cooper (the "Father of Visual Basic) in an article I read some years ago.

That is also mentioned in the History section at:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Visual_Basic_(classic)

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