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

481–490 of 535 posts

Re: Ask HN: Why did Visual Basic die?

#481

Post by anonzzzies »

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!

One of our clients runs everything on access; from the office security, factory automation, ERP, crm, hrm, cms and more. We are moving them to a cloud platform that will allow them to not change one thing but save them a fortune not having to deal with the many issues access has.

Re: Ask HN: Why did Visual Basic die?

#482

Post by ta1243 »

Khartoum wrote: post #478
Spooky23 wrote: post #381

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The issue is there’s no engineering process around it, even in a shitty organization where the “engineering” is garbage. One place I helped out at had a pretty awesome access app for doing some business functions. Way better than the Oracle whatever they failed to replace it with. The problem was, nobody was willing to claim ownership. The business guy who wrote it was long gone, and IT would not accept an Access app…

> The problem was, nobody was willing to claim ownership. The business guy who wrote it was long gone, and IT would not accept an Access app. If the business relies upon that Access app, and IT refuses to accept it, then it's a failure of IT to accept it and then replace it. IT exists to serve the business.

If Nobody in the business is willing to sponsor the application then it shouldn't be there.

Re: Ask HN: Why did Visual Basic die?

#483

Post by harry8 »

rvba wrote: post #461
harry8 wrote: post #356

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

It is funny how you talk tjat Excel is bad and the examples just dont work. Also lack of accuracy in calculating some complicated statistics that "nobody" uses is not really a calculation bug. Also most of those come from the fact that Excel has a precision of 15 digits.

My fav was when ms announced they'd paid an academic to fix =rand(), ignoring all the others.

Let's see it. Fill the visible part of a sheet with it, conditional format the cells, red for negative etc.

hit f9 to recalc and see a big bunches of cells turn red. Fixed random function to return a random number between 0 and 1.

I haven't worked on gnumeric for a long time - examples came from gnumeric.org

Excel was really bad for everything beyond basic arithmetic, way beyond the important issues with floating poiny listed here https://docs.oracle.com/cd/E19957-01/806-3568/ncg_goldberg.h...

Anyone seen anything about ms actually fixing the bugs? I haven't.

Re: Ask HN: Why did Visual Basic die?

#484

Post by analog31 »

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'm sure this happens all the time. The term is technical debt.

I think there's a kind of no-mans-land, where programs get too big for an individual hacker to manage, but too small to muster the programming department. Getting small tasks done on any kind of timeline is usually just a no-go.

Re: Ask HN: Why did Visual Basic die?

#485

Post by markus_zhang »

mike_hearn wrote: post #460
markus_zhang wrote: post #358

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

There are VB like tools. These days they're all SaaS though. Oracle APEX is one well known one, there are plenty of others out there. There are at least three massive problems faced by anyone who wants to hew closer to the VB6 model: 1. Deployment tech. 2. Getting people to pay for it. 3. Developer culture. In order: Deployment. There are tools and UI toolkits today that support VB6/Delphi-like development, but they…

Thanks for the detailed explanations, makes sense.

Re: Ask HN: Why did Visual Basic die?

#486

Post by rubslopes »

meredydd wrote: post #120
_f1dq wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can write HTML/CSS/JS and a few back-end languages like PHP in my sleep but there's no way I could hand-code a web app as fast as I could a desktop app in 1997 using VB. I would LOVE it if I could, though.

Have you tried https://anvil.works ? (I'm a founder!) It's quite explicitly VB-esque (only using Python), and having a single paradigm rather than stitching together several different programs speeds things up even for those who can write HTML/JS/CSS in their sleep. (And of course, you can drop out to JS/CSS/HTML if you want.) Overall I think the development speed is comparable to VB6.

meredydd, can I host my own instance of an anvil app?

Re: Ask HN: Why did Visual Basic die?

#487

Post by TMWNN »

anonzzzies wrote: post #480
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 keep saying this to all the depressed new and old programmers who believe you cannot make money anymore and it’s all over; there are billions of lines of legacy shite running the biggest companies in the world. Not only Cobol and Fortran, but excel/vba, access, fox pro, and, indeed, old php. Companies have to choose, every year, to rewrite or maintain. I do many projects focusing on maintain; example; my last clien…

>I have a very low tolerance for rewrites so we go in hard against companies offering them: we make far far more profit than any of them; we run well over 50% with far less risk. Once I discovered containers (chroots in the late 90s and now docker etc), I knew rewriting things is never needed.

Vernor Vinge figured this out 25 years ago. A Deepness in the Sky depicts a human society thousands of years in the future, in which pretty much all software has already been written; it's just a matter of finding it. So programmer-archaeologists search archives and run code on emulators in emulators in emulators as far back as needed. https://garethrees.org/2013/06/12/archaeology/>

(Heck, just today I migrated a VM to its third hypervisor. It has been a VM for 15 years, and began as a physical machine more than two decades ago.)

Re: Ask HN: Why did Visual Basic die?

#488

Post by fendy3002 »

yoava wrote: post #426
fendy3002 wrote: post #416

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 us…

Yes and nowadays there's nodejs with react, where there's javascript on both client and server, with addition of html and css making desktop app that's not multi platform, almost obsolete.

Which is why lately companies are trying to use electron or react native to replace them.

Re: Ask HN: Why did Visual Basic die?

#489

Post by JohnDeHope »

My two cents: the web. It's not that VB died, it's that we stopped targeting the desktop for intranet line of business apps. It all went to the web. Deployment and support of web apps is an order of magnitude easier than thick clients, maybe two orders of magnitude easier. As an industry we never looked back.

Re: Ask HN: Why did Visual Basic die?

#490

Post by mike_hearn »

wkat4242 wrote: post #472
mike_hearn wrote: post #454

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Correct, nobody cared about "true" VB multithreading. Besides VB supported multi-processing very well, much better than the JS world does today. You could call objects between threads no problem. Behind the scenes it was using DCOM, so if you passed an object from one thread to another, the other thread would get a proxy that'd do RPCs to the first thread. So there was no true shared memory multithreading, but for VB…

But the whole thing of the UI being on the same thread was a really big problem. You could get around it by calling the Win32 Threads API but that would quickly lead to a crashfest due to the no shared memory thing. Electron doesn't have this problem because the UI is handled by the renderer, not the JS engine. So in that sense the UI is in a separate thread. This wasn't the case for VB6. And events in VB6 were not g…

I don't quite understand what you mean by UI being in a separate thread. You could have background threads in VB from what I recall (it's been a while...). The only difference is that Electron/JS forces you to do your own IPC messages whereas Windows would abstract that out.
Post reply on HN