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Will VBA Die? (2019)

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Re: Will VBA Die? (2019)

#151

Post by marcosdumay »

_bxg1 wrote: post #92

It's weird to me that we haven't settled on a common, stable, purpose-built high-level language specifically for business logic. Stuff that doesn't change much, that doesn't need to concern itself with the platform, only the business. That code should be portable to whatever shiny new underlying system gets invented; why does it keep having to be re-expressed every few years? The situation is much better (though stil…

Him... We do have a standard language for business data and rules. It's called SQL.

But current programs are 99% incidental complexity that it won't help solving, so programmers tend to avoid the language.

Re: Will VBA Die? (2019)

#152

Post by kilon »

Well judging from the fact that my first computer my father bought back in 1988 Amstrad CPC 6128 is still alive and kicking with very active community and more development tools than it ever had, I think its safe to assume that software never dies. Only thing it takes is a small dedicated community and it can last for centuries. Partly because father and mothers infect their sons and daughters with their passion for the technology and the the loop never ends. What else never dies is necrophilia in software , apparently people are addicted to declaring software dead prematurely. Oh and of course clickbait because some people are desperate for views. It started with Java back in to 2000s and still going strong. I am not fan of Java but I am also not that delusional to declare Java dead. So no I think its pretty safe to assume VBA is not going anywhere.

Re: Will VBA Die? (2019)

#154

Post by Ididntdothis »

pessimizer wrote: post #148
Ididntdothis wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maintaining VBA code is probably easier than maintaining C code. You have all the tools to structure things nicely. You even have classes. One problem is that you can’t version control Excel or Access code. I think that’s the biggest weakness.

I used to use a weird excel extension that I found somewhere that would export all the modules as text and push them to a subversion repo.

I wrote one for Access a long time ago. Worked surprisingly well but it didn’t export queries and table definitions. Should have done that too.

Re: Will VBA Die? (2019)

#155

Post by tracker1 »

imtringued wrote: post #135
tracker1 wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It kind of won in a lot of ways... biggest package ecosystem. The most developers using it. Highly optimized runtime. Supports the use of OO, Functional and Procedural paradigms. Able to run in the browser for online versions. Cross platform and nearly ubiquitous.

>biggest package ecosystem. I don't understand how you can be proud of having the most unusable package ecosystem. Sure the numbers are large but can you actually safely use those packages? No, you can't. Just add a single library and you will include a huge amount of transitive dependencies from random package maintainers over which you have no control. Other languages like Java or Rust have the same problem but thi…

That comes down to due diligence... I look at my bundle outputs and overall package size... I also review the packages I use, and tend to avoid anything that isn't open source. I've also forked packages that have issues I need resolved.

You have all the control in the world, and just because someone is lazy doesn't mean it doesn't work. Beyond this, you probably don't review every single line of code that goes into your applications dependencies regardless of language. It's about impedance vs productivity for the most part.

I tend to, at least with front end projects focus on koa for the server tethered to the UI, React and material-ui ... nearly everything else is one-off building from there. Unless you think the likes Facebook and Google are just one random guy.

Re: Will VBA Die? (2019)

#156

Post by rosybox »

Ididntdothis wrote: post #23
rosybox wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

JavaScript has a huge upside because a lot of people already know JavaScript. The more tools and platforms switch to JavaScript the more of an office superhero users are when they know something about the language. The productivity of employees will jump off the charts. When you send someone to train for one thing that utilizes JavaScript you get the benefit that those skills may also happen to work with something el…

Most potential users of VBA don’t know JavaScript or any other language. And VB is way more accessible than JavaScript.

Sure, but it's not as big as an ecosystem. Knowing JavaScript at this point is way more valuable than learning VBA. I'm not saying VBA is bad, I think visual basic is great, I have fond memories of it, but reality is JavaScript is going to be what companies are going to want their employees to know.

Re: Will VBA Die? (2019)

#157

Post by Ididntdothis »

rosybox wrote: post #156
Ididntdothis wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most potential users of VBA don’t know JavaScript or any other language. And VB is way more accessible than JavaScript.

Sure, but it's not as big as an ecosystem. Knowing JavaScript at this point is way more valuable than learning VBA. I'm not saying VBA is bad, I think visual basic is great, I have fond memories of it, but reality is JavaScript is going to be what companies are going to want their employees to know.

Can JavaScript use COM libraries and windows APIs? The JavaScript ecosystem is big but I doubt it covers much of what a typical VBA application needs. I think C# or another .Net language would be more suitable.

Re: Will VBA Die? (2019)

#158

Post by srcmap »

sebazzz wrote: post #93
kevas wrote: post #63

Nah... why should it? It works and it does what it needs to do and more if you decide to hook into the Windows API or Mac’s API. Want to parse 500mb structured XML file? Okay. Takes 3 seconds or so. I had a lot of fun creating a full featured & modern look & feel application using Excel’s VBA runtime as my platform. Sure... I had to create everything from scratch, but learned so much while doing it. Kind of miss it a…

Problem is that VBA in its current shape doesn't work for webbased Excel. Microsoft started with attempting to support Javascript based add-ins [0]. However, they those are of course light years behind in terms of API support. Never even mind that on the desktop Excel the javascript runs in the Internet Explorer engine (of all things, not even the EdgeHTML engine). [0] https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/office/dev/add-…

In theory, MS can compile the VBA engine to web assembly and run VBA code directly on webpage?

Re: Will VBA Die? (2019)

#159

Post by kevas »

ptx wrote: post #127
kevas wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It was extremely easy. For awhile, I used naming conventions to keep everything organized, but then found RubberDuckVBA and there... I found enlightenment. The codebase was clean and extensible. I built out a standard lib (I/O sync/async, networking, array methods, dictionary class, XML utilities (DOM/SAX). Then built out database functionality that included auto exporting to various formats, many tabs and with optio…

Did you build some kind of component tree diffing for the reactive UI, like React? Or data binding? And how did you design the async parts, given that VBA doesn't have first-class functions? Classes and interfaces? Or nested event loops?

Vba has classes, enumerated, interfaces, events, collections, stacks, queues, array lists, dictionary, and more.

Re: Will VBA Die? (2019)

#160

Post by kevas »

lmm wrote: post #130
Ididntdothis wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maintaining VBA code is probably easier than maintaining C code. You have all the tools to structure things nicely. You even have classes. One problem is that you can’t version control Excel or Access code. I think that’s the biggest weakness.

C is a pretty low bar. And yeah, not being able to do version control, diffs, releases, dependency management... it all adds up.

I had version control and everything
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