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Something Pretty Right: The History and Legacy of Visual Basic

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Re: Something Pretty Right: The History and Legacy of Visual Basic

#151

Post by cmiles74 »

rob74 wrote: post #28

Hilarious quote (notwithstanding the fact that bus drivers usually have to work shifts, also on weekends): > Almost all Visual Basic 6 programmers were content with what Visual Basic 6 did. They were happy to be bus drivers: to leave the office at 5 p.m. (or 4:30 p.m. on a really nice day) instead of working until midnight; to play with their families on weekends instead of trudging back to the office. They didn't la…

I'm not down with the "bus driver" metaphor, but the bit about a vocal and active minority steering the direction of the technology for the rest of us certainly rings true. I think a read an article on HN about exactly this, but in the terms of React and Wordpress.

Re: Something Pretty Right: The History and Legacy of Visual Basic

#152

Post by cutler »

bena wrote: post #138
deafpolygon wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And Access! That's one amazing piece of software.

No. Fuck Access. Access is a useless piece of software that serves no purpose well. Either your data is small enough to be managed by Excel or your data is complex enough to be better served by a database and frontend. Dealing with the idiosyncrasies of Access is never worth it.

So how do you build a desktop database with a staff user interface for a small business running on a couple of Windows desktops?

Re: Something Pretty Right: The History and Legacy of Visual Basic

#153

Post by teh_klev »

mysterydip wrote: post #91
orthoxerox wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

VB.NET wasn't that different as a language, it was more of a Python 2/3 situation. Lots of overall improvements, but not backwards compatible. Terrible, but not catastrophic. What MS did was break the whole ecosystem. VB6 had thousands of third-party libraries distributed as VBX/OCX controls. VB.NET had effectively zero, because it could only use the new WinForms controls. You could upgrade your codebase to VB.NET us…

This could be implied with your python comparison, but meanings of things changed as well. For example dim foo as integer(5) in vb6 would give you 6 elements (0-5) of a 16 bit numeric type. In .net it would give you 5 elements (0-4) of a 32 bit numeric type. For those curious, a really good list of changes is here: http://www.thescarms.com/vbasic/vb6vsvbnet.aspx

> For example dim foo as integer(5) in vb6 would give you 6 elements (0-5)

Then add into the mix the "Option Base" statement, which if it was declared as "Option Base 1" your aforementioned array would only have elements 1-5. Trying to access element 0 would incur a "Subscript out of range" error.

Re: Something Pretty Right: The History and Legacy of Visual Basic

#154

Post by fatnoah »

wslh wrote: post #73

As a system programmer who used VB6 as a glue or ochestrator (early 2000s) of low level components I say the only important flaw I found was on its single threading model. In the 2000s VB was rusty but amazed me when I remembered that pedantically (shame on me) criticized the VB developers of the 90s against the C/C++ hardcores. It was on high school though. Nerd issues.

> As a system programmer who used VB6 as a glue or ochestrator (early 2000s) of low level components I say the only important flaw I found was on its single threading model.

As a developer cutting my professional teeth in the late 90's / early 2000's, VB was amazing for building utilities and other bits of software run by individuals on their machines. When we tried to reuse components built for those applications in our web applications, issues with the threading (single threaded apartment) model soon became apparent, so we rewrote those in C++ in order to support the level of concurrency we needed.

Re: Something Pretty Right: The History and Legacy of Visual Basic

#155

Post by bigbillheck »

interfixus wrote: post #87
pjc50 wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the implication was that his radical puritanism left him unemployable except as a literal bus driver.

Very droll, but incorrect. Also, I believe the word you're looking for is purism . I'll certainly go along with that. Also also, out of curiosity, where did you dredge up the "he"?

> where did you dredge up the "he"?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28725669

Re: Something Pretty Right: The History and Legacy of Visual Basic

#156

Post by segmondy »

cmiles74 wrote: post #151
rob74 wrote: post #28

Hilarious quote (notwithstanding the fact that bus drivers usually have to work shifts, also on weekends): > Almost all Visual Basic 6 programmers were content with what Visual Basic 6 did. They were happy to be bus drivers: to leave the office at 5 p.m. (or 4:30 p.m. on a really nice day) instead of working until midnight; to play with their families on weekends instead of trudging back to the office. They didn't la…

I'm not down with the "bus driver" metaphor, but the bit about a vocal and active minority steering the direction of the technology for the rest of us certainly rings true. I think a read an article on HN about exactly this, but in the terms of React and Wordpress.

What is wrong with bus drivers?

Re: Something Pretty Right: The History and Legacy of Visual Basic

#157

Post by jjkaczor »

lproven wrote: post #111
deafpolygon wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is true. People don't understand that there is an upper limit to Access before you run into issues - but it's fairly large.. what was it? 4GB? Edit: 2gb!

It's worse than that. The thing that imposes these limitations is the somewhat primitive DB engine for Access, which is codenamed MS Jet: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Access_Database_Engine But the big that MS & MS fans don't like to mention is that MS Exchange Server uses a version of the same storage engine . It's not mentioned even once in these Wikipedia articles, for instance, but if you look, you will find tel…

Sigh - don't get me started on Jet engine DB corruption... You wink at it, over a network with more than a single user - and you have a chance of corruption...

Re: Something Pretty Right: The History and Legacy of Visual Basic

#158

Post by bombolo »

duncans wrote: post #33
qup wrote: post #11

I spent a couple weeks downloading a pirated vb6 with a download manager that could resume. I think it was 1GB, on dial-up. Once I had it installed I had like 6mb free space. I made a bunch of AO-progz and an mp3 player. And a bunch of friends in #vb6 on aol, which I keep to this day.

It would have been around a few 100MB as most hard drives were less than 1GB back then.

When vb5 was around my hard drive at home was 3GB.

Re: Something Pretty Right: The History and Legacy of Visual Basic

#159

Post by cmiles74 »

segmondy wrote: post #156
cmiles74 wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not down with the "bus driver" metaphor, but the bit about a vocal and active minority steering the direction of the technology for the rest of us certainly rings true. I think a read an article on HN about exactly this, but in the terms of React and Wordpress.

What is wrong with bus drivers?

Nothing is wrong with bus drivers! :-) I'm not sure comparing software developers to bus drivers is a metaphor that gets us very far... In fact, why some bus drivers might want to really be flying fighter jets also had me scratching my head.

Re: Something Pretty Right: The History and Legacy of Visual Basic

#160

Post by anthk »

cutler wrote: post #152
bena wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No. Fuck Access. Access is a useless piece of software that serves no purpose well. Either your data is small enough to be managed by Excel or your data is complex enough to be better served by a database and frontend. Dealing with the idiosyncrasies of Access is never worth it.

So how do you build a desktop database with a staff user interface for a small business running on a couple of Windows desktops?

Lazarus + SQLite. Problem solved.
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