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Ask HN: Why did Visual Basic die?

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Re: Ask HN: Why did Visual Basic die?

#131

Post by nobodyandproud »

bmitc wrote: post #76

I think the answer is: because Microsoft let it. I'm a big fan of modern .NET, but my biggest complaint is that Microsoft views, and always has, the CLR as the C# Language Runtime and not the Common Language Runtime. For example, see the relationship between F# and C#. The CLR is constantly getting features that are only to support features in C#, leaving F# in a position where they either don't get the feature, can'…

Interestingly enough there are a small handful of things VB.NET and C++/CLI can do which C# can't, which enable the former languages to have better interoperability with COM interfaces.

That was with .NET Framework and I'm not sure what the story is today with .NET Core aka .NET 5+.

Re: Ask HN: Why did Visual Basic die?

#132

Post by codazoda »

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…

I was a hobby VB developer at this time and I abandoned it shortly after VB.net without really realizing why. I also abandoned Windows completely shortly thereafter.

The main thing that killed me was the size of the files that you had to distribute when you used VB.net. No one had the .net runtime early on and it was absolutely massive. I was paying for outgoing data by the gigabyte back then and our connections were much slower.

Re: Ask HN: Why did Visual Basic die?

#133

Post by Guvante »

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…

Yeah, as someone who worked somewhere that had a VB6 project: VB.net was only at all useful as a stop gap between VB and C# and a barely useful one at that.

The language as it stands is fine and interop with .NET means it is a decent choice to use, outside of C# just having a bigger user base from a "how easy can I hire devs" standpoint.

Re: Ask HN: Why did Visual Basic die?

#134

Post by mamcx »

The reason is even bigger than just VB.

MS at the time just decide to fully kill the "enthusiast" developer and the "single/truly small" team developer. This is mostly covered under the "RAD" umbrella.

It kills VB, FoxPro, and now more evidently, Access (more like let it slowly die).

.NET + Visual Studio + Sql Server are not a substitute in this market. Them are for "professional developer"/"a small cog in a big machine". The worst part is that this move somehow kill the other tools in this space (because somehow others follow suit or whatever) and without somebody leading the charge to see how adapt this tool for the web. MS not getting the Web, Borland doing Hara-kiri and others getting annihilated by "free" open source and all that not helps.

Ironically, this market have rebound in the myriad of tools like "low code, notebooks, etc" that fill (badly!) the gap.

Re: Ask HN: Why did Visual Basic die?

#135

Post by vector_spaces »

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…

"2D programming" is normally called array programming, and it's common in scientific computing, ML, and finance. It does require a different mindset, kind of similar to SQL but not exactly. See APL, K, q, NumPy, matlab, Julia, and friends for languages that embrace this paradigm

Re: Ask HN: Why did Visual Basic die?

#136

Post by eternityforest »

The FOSS community could do SO much better if they wanted to, with reactive web tech, typescript instead of basic, a project file format that's easy to work with in Git, Android support, etc.

Despite all this talk about no-code, it seems like all we have now is like, a CMS that lets you embed Google maps, but if you want to do anything more you have to use code.

Maybe it's just that end users usually don't need to build anything anymore, there's almost always an professionally made app for everything.

I've tried many times to "Build the app you want to see in the world" and almost every time the result is I decide that living with and working around the imperfections of what's out there is more practical than building and maintaining anything by myself in hopes of the the very small chance people notice and it becomes A Thing.

Perhaps better dev tools like VB aimed at one off software like that could change the equation, and if the tools existed we'd all find uses for them?

Re: Ask HN: Why did Visual Basic die?

#138

Post by mulmen »

I just recently wanted to spin up a simple CRUD UI over a simple DB schema and also thought of Visual Basic for the first time in a long time. It seems so well suited to something like building operational tooling for the endless parade of internal APIs.

Re: Ask HN: Why did Visual Basic die?

#139

Post by Guvante »

nobodyandproud wrote: post #131
bmitc wrote: post #76

I think the answer is: because Microsoft let it. I'm a big fan of modern .NET, but my biggest complaint is that Microsoft views, and always has, the CLR as the C# Language Runtime and not the Common Language Runtime. For example, see the relationship between F# and C#. The CLR is constantly getting features that are only to support features in C#, leaving F# in a position where they either don't get the feature, can'…

Interestingly enough there are a small handful of things VB.NET and C++/CLI can do which C# can't, which enable the former languages to have better interoperability with COM interfaces. That was with .NET Framework and I'm not sure what the story is today with .NET Core aka .NET 5+.

They eventually added optional names parameters which made the interop problem much better for C# compared to VB.

C# wasn't as good still but you no longer had to put earlier params at their default value (which is what made it unusable).

C++/CLI will probably remain king of interop though being a Frankenstein combination of the .NET runtime and C++.

Re: Ask HN: Why did Visual Basic die?

#140

Post by agumonkey »

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…

Great points. And in a tongue in cheek way, having reactive components you can attach handlers to fetch / redraw you UI .. is still there, it's just labelled vue or react ;)
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