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Ask HN: Why did Visual Basic die?

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Re: Ask HN: Why did Visual Basic die?

#421

Post by jules22 »

labrador wrote: post #363
kwhitefoot wrote: post #224

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not if you are trying to create a GUI.

I've enjoyed several Python programs over the years that had a nice Windows GUI interface https://wiki.python.org/moin/GuiProgramming

Me too. But it just was never enjoyable creating those UIs. I have tried almost all of them. The closest Python had to VB was Boa Constructor. It never really took off.

https://boa-constructor.sourceforge.net/Screenshots/

Python is light years ahead of VB6 in productivity in scripting, except when it comes to putting together a quick database frontend or just any other GUI app. My favorite was Delphi over VB. Nothing ever came close in Python in GUI building, even 25 years later.

Re: Ask HN: Why did Visual Basic die?

#422

Post by jules22 »

bryanlarsen wrote: post #18

My personal reason, which is probably unique: VB 1.0 was extremely buggy, making it unusable for my use cases. VB 1.1, which fixed the bugs I was encountering, was a paid upgrade. I switched to Linux and never looked back.

VB 5 and 6 were where things worked. They both had native compilers.

Re: Ask HN: Why did Visual Basic die?

#423

Post by yoava »

marcus_holmes wrote: post #407
yoava wrote: post #403

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I do not think the problem with VB was the language. I think it was the graphic / UI expressive power, a simple way to add and create custom components. At the same time that both VB and Delphi reached peak usage, the web started to show how easy it is to express graphically and UI using CSS. When you have to write tons of lines of code in VB to get to the same as 3 lines of CSS...

This doesn't match my experience, if anything the other way around. CSS back then was a lot harder than it is now. There's still memes around this, but even something as common as centering an item with CSS was not trivial at all. Now we have flex and it's easy, but back then it was very much not. VB didn't work on the same paradigm - it was a more WYSIWYG environment. You drew a button on the form, set some properti…

Having worked for 10 years on both Delphi and VS, I understand the experience you are talking about. Having the ability to draw UI is amazing, and super productive. For business applications, it is amazing.

However, I still remember at around 2002 that we where asked to build specific custom user experiences, I think it was around reports, and using VB or Delphi was a lot of programming using draw commands... while using HTML and CSS it was fairly easy, even with the browser differences of CSS.

Any custom component in VS or Delphi (I am talking atomic components, not composite) requires using basic draw commands, and a lot of them.

The end result was that both platforms are not as expressive in terms of UI as the web, you cannot compare basic draw commands to structured CSS.

Re: Ask HN: Why did Visual Basic die?

#424

Post by system2 »

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 can't imagine Excel without VBA. I tried Google Spreadsheets with js and it sucked big time.

Re: Ask HN: Why did Visual Basic die?

#425

Post by jules22 »

ecshafer wrote: post #44
datavirtue wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hmmm...I'm wondering if you have ever used Netbeans. There is a GUI builder for Java Swing. Top notch.

Netbeans java gui builder is the only builder I’ve seen come close to the vb gui builder. In fact I was a little disappointed moving from net beans to a “real Java ide” since their gui builders don’t exist or aren’t as good. But vb as a language is a lot better than Java for getting to a productive state for a novice.

The best IMO was in Delphi. Lazarus captures that spirit well today but is mostly unknown.

Netbeans GUI builder was more powerful than VB's in some ways but just made simple things complicated.

Re: Ask HN: Why did Visual Basic die?

#426

Post by yoava »

fendy3002 wrote: post #416
marcus_holmes wrote: post #407

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This doesn't match my experience, if anything the other way around. CSS back then was a lot harder than it is now. There's still memes around this, but even something as common as centering an item with CSS was not trivial at all. Now we have flex and it's easy, but back then it was very much not. VB didn't work on the same paradigm - it was a more WYSIWYG environment. You drew a button on the form, set some properti…

can vouch on this, since originally I really prefer WYSIWYG UI (VB, C# winforms, wpf) over web early. However security-wise it's hard to enforce when using them, since they don't really operating using client-server by default, having your backend logic prone to be reverse engineered. This doesn't happen in web apps, since backend logic stays on the server. Whipping a html UI over the already server-client architectu…

VB and Delphi reference architecture was 2 tier - client and database. With this reference architecture, you are right about the security and distribution problems. You just reminded me of the shareware market and the hacked shareware markets...

However, early on, around 1998, people started talking on 3 tier architecture of client - server - database on both platforms. There where even attempts to build web pages using both platforms (and later on .Net), which failed because of a lot of reasons, one big reason was not understanding the advantages of CSS.

Re: Ask HN: Why did Visual Basic die?

#428

Post by system2 »

cebert wrote: post #289

To be clear, Visual Basic isn’t dead. I work in the govtech space. I can assure you that there are VB6 applications still running into production in this space, even places you would not expect. VB6 doesn’t support threading, but I’ve seen Computer Aided Dispatch applications that use C++ to multi-thread VB6 server code for emergency 911 dispatch. VB6 still runs on Windows, and will even work just fine in AWS.

I've seen very established finance firms using DOS software from 90s. Still in 2023. Hard to imagine but it is what it is.

Re: Ask HN: Why did Visual Basic die?

#429

Post by makeitdouble »

ksec wrote: post #351
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.

> The nerds

The people with money really. Few people care what the nerds complain about, but Microsoft will listen to Fortune 500 companies that hold thousands of top tier paying users and their complaints about how such or such feature would help them save days of work every months.

This the ultimate "vote with your wallet" I think, those with bigger wallets will have bigger votes.

Re: Ask HN: Why did Visual Basic die?

#430

Post by vparikh »

Microsoft killed VB for one very simple reason:

They were terrified of Java and the JVM that went along with it, as it would make their cash cow - Windows possibly redundant. They basically switched everything to .Net and the CLR.

Also, you are looking at VB through rose tinted glasses. VB was a terrible system to build products on: - Poor language. BASIC is not, as implemented by VB, a production level language. I am sure folks will argue that point, but I will stand by it. - The component model was terrible - you had to drop in to C and use OLE/DCOM to create components for it. A VB dev couldn't create components directly in VB. - DLL HELL. Shipping VB code was a nightmare.

Delphi was an answer to all of this - but Microsoft killed that too by stealing Anders Hejlsberg, whow went on to create the .Net frameworks, implementing many of the Delphi innovations in a Microsoft ecosystem.

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