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Why do people still use VBA?

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Re: Why do people still use VBA?

#71

Post by emodendroket »

_boffin_ wrote: post #5

Because it’s amazing! /s Years ago, I heard that JP Morgan had +20k access databases on their network. The data analysts that make up companies far and wide one day discovered that they hate what they’re doing every day. They investigate the “record macro” button. Some might even find it nifty. They use it again and again. Some may even try to get smart and investigate and get curious of the code that it spat out. So…

Yeah to be honest I did something like this and then I switched to C#. Now I"m just a software developer.

Re: Why do people still use VBA?

#72

Post by emodendroket »

asdfman123 wrote: post #59

The article linked within the article, "Your Organization Probably Doesn't Want To Improve Things," is interesting because I know *exactly* what the author's problem is. The problem is they're an intelligent person falling short of their potential. As understandable as it is, raging against people around you for their shortcomings isn't going to help you or them. You've got to do the hard and scary work of grinding y…

No matter what lofty heights you achieve you're never really free of external constraints.

Re: Why do people still use VBA?

#73

Post by emodendroket »

djbusby wrote: post #19
kibwen wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The difference here is that Linux devs would get rightly chided for building entire applications in shell scripts. The existence a "glue language" isn't a bad thing, rather, it's a good thing. But when you wake up to find that your whole project is made of 100% glue, you might consider that a bit of a mess.

Entire apps in shell can be very good, eg: gnu pass Exception, not the rule.

Sure, they're great, so long as I don't have to modify them.

Re: Why do people still use VBA?

#74

Post by emodendroket »

mcbishop wrote: post #38

VBA is a lovely language, that supports object-oriented programming (with composition... no inheritance). It has deep access to and control of Excel. It's mature and stable (Microsoft is no longer significantly changing it). "Real programmers" hate on it largely because of all the amateur spaghetti VBA code written by the business people (that the programmers are occasionally asked to debug).

I mean I think it's fair to look askance at any environment that includes misfeatures like `On Error Resume Next`.

Re: Why do people still use VBA?

#76

Post by IYasha »

Because it's the only option? When I was writing my PHD thesis in Word 2003, there was no other possibility to generate list of references than to write the script yourself. So I did. This doc is still lying around somewhere and probably works. While not very pretty, still more readable than Perl or Python :D

Re: Why do people still use VBA?

#77

Post by pizza234 »

wiseowise wrote: post #58
donatj wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This. My friend automated his whole job in Excel. He supposedly can do a days work in fifteen minutes and then just hang out. Their computers are super locked down, can’t install anything, can’t go to any non-whitelisted sites, but they have Excel.

I always read those “X automated their job, finishes it 15 minutes and then does whatever” and wonder how true are they? How could it be that nobody notices or cares?

In one of my first jobs I was a contractor for the government. There was blatant corruption (or inefficiency, depending on how one sees it); I was employed full time, but the daily amount of actual work to perform, took around one hour.

Although I wasn't in the condition of automating the time required down to N minutes, I can see how this dynamic plays - essentially, BigCo with dysfunctional management, where efficiency doesn't really matter.

Re: Why do people still use VBA?

#78

Post by pyeri »

throwaway154 wrote: post #2

Corps have a dev environment sitting right in Excel that doesn't need special (management, management's management, adding to a registrar of projects, budgeting or project manager assigned, etc) approval for non-stock software. The stack's Excel, plus Sharepoint if you're really looking for a networked data store that also has a web interface. From that end-user direction, solutions emerge. And they're in VBA.

Plus Visual Basic is a very powerful language on its own. Given an environment such as Excel Macros, its power can be unleashed and utilized to a great extent and that's what power users in many enterprises do.

This is quite reminiscent of the good old "emacs operating system" paradigm just applied to a different context!

Re: Why do people still use VBA?

#80

Post by hnlmorg »

dartos wrote: post #51
vbezhenar wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't understand how's Excel page with macros inside different from random exe file from security perspective? Does Excel have some kind of excellent sandbox implementation, so it's safe to run random macros on the work machine?

Can you call os level functions from an excel macro? Can you access raw memory from it? If the answer to either of those is no, then that’s a big difference.

Yes you can. VBA can make the same Win32 API calls as VB6. Something I exploited back in the tail end of the 90s.
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