Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Ask HN: Why did Visual Basic die?

news.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

431–440 of 535 posts

Re: Ask HN: Why did Visual Basic die?

#431

Post by wcoenen »

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

There is no "net framework 2.7":

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/framework/migration...

Re: Ask HN: Why did Visual Basic die?

#432

Post by pellenys »

gwbas1c wrote: post #276

I learned Visual Basic (6) a few months before I learned C#. Hands-down, C# was a much better language. Visual Basic (the language) always left me feeling dirty compared to C#. Both languages have similar learning curves for a novice; but C# includes industrial strength features that allow code written by a novice to be refactored instead of rewritten when the need comes along. Both languages have a similar way for d…

The casual nature is what made it so popular. You could write some fairly disciplined code with VB6, but once you turned Option Explicit off and added some On Error Resume Nexts and embraced variants, you had something you could write with without knowing much about programming. I’m a big fan of C#, but I’m a professional developer and I know how types and exceptions work (for example). I knew plenty of have-a-go managers who would have balked at C# but produced reams of…interesting…VB6 code.

Re: Ask HN: Why did Visual Basic die?

#433

Post by bonzini »

gremlinunderway wrote: post #394
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.

Budibase looks really impressive, basically a GUI frontend builder for postgres and its open source. Haven't actually deployed it, but played with the GUI builder and its nice. There's a few other similar ones out there too like Baserow [2], Appsmith [3] and nocodb [4]. Finally, if you wanted a step up, then I guess supabase [5] would be the next one up but its more like "I just want to write front end and have auth,…

At least Access has a sound model underneath. Excel is nothing but a damn grid, while Access has tables, keys and constraints _and_ a visual GUI builder on top of those. The development environment was an only slightly pared-down Visual Basic but it was fully integrated in the rest of the GUI, while VBA always felt like it was tacked on the rest of the application.

Re: Ask HN: Why did Visual Basic die?

#434

Post by emodendroket »

markus_zhang wrote: post #358
Blackthorn wrote: post #344

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The people most interested in such a product are not those with the skills to build it.

Re: Ask HN: Why did Visual Basic die?

#435

Post by wkat4242 »

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.net was a bit weird yes but visual basic did need work. Vb6 did not have multithreading which was really starting to hurt its efficacy by 2002. You could work around it by using events as much as possible but there were still some things that were blocking. Also the events were not even on a separate thread either leading to the need to pepper DoEvents everywhere.

This was a dealbreaker for vb to ever become a serious language and kept it squarely in the hobby bob / prototyping arena. But who wants to prototype in a language that requires a full rewrite in another language to go to production?

In the long run this was always unsustainable. The rewrite to .net fixed this but it was a significant departure from vb underpinnings and in particular the seamless winforms integration that was pretty amazing.

Also, with .net came multilingual capability and c# got really popular quickly and displaced vb.net

Re: Ask HN: Why did Visual Basic die?

#436

Post by bitwize »

Thankfully VB's "Unix philosophy" counterpart -- Tcl/Tk -- lives on. I have always found it faster to go from zero to GUI by laying it out declaratively in Tcl/Tk than by rat wrestling in VB -- and the results look better. With the Snit object system (part of the popular Tcllib), building components out of the basic widgets becomes a breeze.

The problem with VB and with other "business languages" going back to COBOL is that the skill ceiling is low. Not as low as this decade's no-code craze, but tools like that make the easy bits easier and the hard bits asymptotically approach impossible -- and as projects mature, hard bits dominate the lifecycle. Tcl has an absurdly high skill ceiling but it has problems of its own. You can do crazy Lisp-style metaprogramming, but the semantics are as if designed by a Lovecraftian madman who'd been exposed to dread Cthulhu.

So nothing is perfect but there are ways to feel as productive as VB, even today.

Re: Ask HN: Why did Visual Basic die?

#437

Post by ShadowBanThis01 »

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.

I worked for a company where we built a prototype for a rewrite of their flagship product in VB. Meanwhile a big team of programmers implemented the “production” version in VC++. But at that time a bunch of the controls available in VB were not in VC, so they lagged quite a bit. Of course management saw the prototype working (it was a CRUD app for property management) and said why not just use this. The C++ programmers turned up their noses at working in VB and were summarily fired, leaving me and a team of contractors to finish the job. 100% the right business decision and a good lesson on getting too precious with your tech.

Re: Ask HN: Why did Visual Basic die?

#438

Post by viraptor »

wcoenen wrote: post #431
viraptor wrote: post #292

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 There is no "net framework 2.7": https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/framework/migration...

Typo - I meant 4.7. Although it looks like they finally moved to 4.8 in w11.

Re: Ask HN: Why did Visual Basic die?

#439

Post by bowsamic »

jamra wrote: post #357
radicalbyte wrote: post #217

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The ViewState problem is easily avoided by keeping it on the server

Re: Ask HN: Why did Visual Basic die?

#440

Post by ShadowBanThis01 »

dkga wrote: post #415
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…

As someone who loved coding in VB6: (I actually dreamt about it the other night, thought I woke up some 20 yrs ago!) - very cool that you got to interview the VB team, your article is high on my reading list :) - to OP’s point, I recently started doing some things in Swift with XCode and found sim having just as much fun. I’m using SwiftUI. So maybe not the same experience for everyone but I wanted to share here.

I did a shitload of programming in VBA, specifically Word macros. Word 6 was the peak of that product. I wrote entire text-processing applications in it, with dialog boxes and everything. Started my career at a Big-6 firm with one, actually.

Now I’m learning SwiftUI as well, and like it so far. I’m an experienced iOS dev, but SwiftUI is new to me. But I like it (and QML in Qt) more than I expected. Good luck!

Post reply on HN