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Ask HN: Why did Visual Basic die?

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Re: Ask HN: Why did Visual Basic die?

#121

Post by netsharc »

nottheengineer wrote: post #38
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.

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…

> But if you want to type them, you have to do that in english and then have excel translate them.

Huh? At least in the versions I've used I've always needed to type the commands in German.

There's even an online German - English Excel dictionary...

Re: Ask HN: Why did Visual Basic die?

#123

Post by ilrwbwrkhv »

Honestly it's because Microsoft sucked at marketing. There were so many confusing name choices and unclear development guidelines that people simply stopped using it. Even now developing for windows is a pain and that's because there is like 5 different ways to build an app there.

Re: Ask HN: Why did Visual Basic die?

#124

Post by aldousd666 »

dghlsakjg wrote: post #30

I think for a lot of purposes, the internet kind of took over. VB was great if you needed to do something limited to a single machine. These days, we want data to be available across machines which requires using a network, and the default network is the internet. If I'm going to be using the internet anyway, I can knock up something in HTML + JS + firebase/whatever data store, and have an application that works on a…

Yup, that was also my take. I used to write 'on box' and you communicated between components using Com+, and when you switched to http, there was no reason to stick with just VB6.

Re: Ask HN: Why did Visual Basic die?

#125

Post by aldousd666 »

bmj wrote: post #81
dghlsakjg wrote: post #30

I think for a lot of purposes, the internet kind of took over. VB was great if you needed to do something limited to a single machine. These days, we want data to be available across machines which requires using a network, and the default network is the internet. If I'm going to be using the internet anyway, I can knock up something in HTML + JS + firebase/whatever data store, and have an application that works on a…

Don't forget that VB.NET was a thing. I worked on a web-based client management system that used VB.NET on the back-end.

It still is a thing. VB.net is a CLR language just like C#. You can use a tool to translate from one to the other and back.

Re: Ask HN: Why did Visual Basic die?

#126

Post by AnotherGoodName »

paxys wrote: post #107

> despite all the advances in technology since then, nothing I have found compares to that development experience today You are going to have to qualify this a lot more, because it is absolutely not true. Coding VB was...fine. Language features were primitive, even compared to what was available in the mainstream back then. The tooling was fully proprietary and expensive. Languages and IDEs today are 1000x better in…

It's the Python of yesteryear. Nothing about the language was great but the ecosystem was amazing.

CRUD app creation was almost completely point and click, VBA was easy and you could take data straight from a document and process it in complex ways, the database integrations were great and easy to use.

Re: Ask HN: Why did Visual Basic die?

#127

Post by yarone »

I used VB 3.0 thru VB 6.0 and I echo the sentiment: those were fun and productive times. Really solid integrated development environment centered around the desktop UI / form design / UI controls like buttons, textboxes, combo boxes, etc.

I also agree that the web changed everything and that is the major reason for the shift away.

Re: Ask HN: Why did Visual Basic die?

#128

Post by jzb »

dwheeler wrote: post #87

Visual Basic (both of them) still exist, but their use has dropped dramatically through some big changes: * "Visual .NET" (aka "Visual Fred" http://catb.org/jargon/html/V/Visual-Fred.html ) was released by Microsoft. This was an incompatible language confusingly also called Visual Basic. I don't think Microsoft realized how angry this made developers and businesses, who were being asked to spend hundreds of billions…

Visual Basic is one of the best arguments for open source and community ownership in the history of computing, IMO. Microsoft's decision to tank it was hugely painful for companies that had made major investments in it -- no company should make that kind of investment in a proprietary platform that can be killed off by a single company and not forked and maintained by others.

Re: Ask HN: Why did Visual Basic die?

#130

Post by FpUser »

>"nothing I have found compares to that development experience today. I would go so far as to say we've gone backwards in a big way"

>"I have yet to find a tool that can allow me to be as productive in so short a time as Visual Basic"

I have and do program in many languages. From my perspective - for type the of applications usually done in VB Delphi / Lazarus would run circles around it. Both productivity and performance wise. It is also possible to do things one simply can not accomplish in VB.

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