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Why do people still use VBA?

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Re: Why do people still use VBA?

#201

Post by dabeeeenster »

7thaccount wrote: post #198
layer8 wrote: post #184

– It’s built in. – The IDE is built in. – The syntax is beginner-friendly. – It’s stable and doesn’t change every six month. – It’s well-documented. – No build steps, it just runs, and fast. – It’s resource-efficient (CPU, RAM). – You can easily create dialogs and forms using the built-in visual GUI builder. – You can break into the built-in debugger from your Office document. – If you want to get fancy, it has inter…

VBA serves an awesome niche. I once built an awesome simulator that did some pretty complex optimization stuff. The main sheet had input cells for the user, a couple of radio buttons for toggling certain features, and a button to fire off the built-in Excel solver plugin and pull certain values from that process and display it all on a GUI on the first sheet. It took me just a couple of days despite zero VBA experien…

It might be niche for HN, but in muggle world its enormously popular.

Re: Why do people still use VBA?

#202

Post by usrbinbash »

f1shy wrote: post #187
usrbinbash wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can find bad examples of how things work in basically every department I chose if I look long enough. Are there IT-Managed things that border on insanity? Oh yes. Are these a good excuse to build a shadow IT? No, they are not. Don't get me wrong: I'm not bothered at all when a couple analysts get together and hack away at their own little tools in VBA. Kudos to them for getting into the spirit of things, and maybe…

If IT people would only understand they are giving a service for the rest of the company… and not the way around.

> they are giving a service for the rest of the company

That is very true. And part of that service is to ensure that things run smoothly, securely and according to industry standards.

How well would an IT guy provide that service if he were to let some unvetted, undocumented script hacked together by someone who isn't a professional software engineer, run its merry way across the production database?

Re: Why do people still use VBA?

#203

Post by omneity »

layer8 wrote: post #184

– It’s built in. – The IDE is built in. – The syntax is beginner-friendly. – It’s stable and doesn’t change every six month. – It’s well-documented. – No build steps, it just runs, and fast. – It’s resource-efficient (CPU, RAM). – You can easily create dialogs and forms using the built-in visual GUI builder. – You can break into the built-in debugger from your Office document. – If you want to get fancy, it has inter…

What would have happened if VBScript had won the DHTML wars?

Re: Why do people still use VBA?

#204

Post by TimTheTinker »

menotyou wrote: post #109

Let's face it: IT is the bureaucracy department of modern times which can keep itself 95% busy with self inflicted problems and has 5% service orientation. Processes are opaque for outsiders and typically not helpful. I really had to lough when I read the following description of the IBM BPM but this sums up a good part of the issue: "...while IBM BPM does come with a REST API, this REST API is borderline useless to…

Someone needs to build a wasm interpreter in VBA.

Then we can write programs in Go/Rust/etc and run them in office or wherever.

VBA is to corporate environments what JavaScript is to the web.

Re: Why do people still use VBA?

#205

Post by FuriouslyAdrift »

7thaccount wrote: post #188
usrbinbash wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can find bad examples of how things work in basically every department I chose if I look long enough. Are there IT-Managed things that border on insanity? Oh yes. Are these a good excuse to build a shadow IT? No, they are not. Don't get me wrong: I'm not bothered at all when a couple analysts get together and hack away at their own little tools in VBA. Kudos to them for getting into the spirit of things, and maybe…

Shadow IT exists for a reason and that's the dysfunctional bureaucracy of IT. The "Circle of IT" is real. Small companies start out nimble, but then stuff gets crazy and someone decides to standardize it all under one department. This works for awhile, but eventually this organization becomes so useless that it can't serve any functions of the business anymore, so a shadow IT group is built that the business SMEs lov…

The "bureaucracy of IT" is driven by legal, compliance, and security reasons. The reason why small companies are "nimble" is they are flying by the seat of their pants and one investigation/ransomware/insider threat away from ruin.

Not saying that isn't normal (been there, done that... thanks FINRA), but that's the reason.

Re: Why do people still use VBA?

#206

Post by ethhics »

There is at least one semiconductor test platform which uses Excel workbooks as the programming interface. Automotive chips going in to new vehicles today are being tested for functionality using Office 2003 and VBA

Re: Why do people still use VBA?

#207

Post by jampekka »

usrbinbash wrote: post #170
menotyou wrote: post #109

Let's face it: IT is the bureaucracy department of modern times which can keep itself 95% busy with self inflicted problems and has 5% service orientation. Processes are opaque for outsiders and typically not helpful. I really had to lough when I read the following description of the IBM BPM but this sums up a good part of the issue: "...while IBM BPM does come with a REST API, this REST API is borderline useless to…

I can find bad examples of how things work in basically every department I chose if I look long enough. Are there IT-Managed things that border on insanity? Oh yes. Are these a good excuse to build a shadow IT? No, they are not. Don't get me wrong: I'm not bothered at all when a couple analysts get together and hack away at their own little tools in VBA. Kudos to them for getting into the spirit of things, and maybe…

What bothers me as practically 100% shadow IT worker (to the point of buying my own devices and internet connections with my own money) is that IT-departments don't care about the users, usability or productivity almost at all (and security people are especially bad at this). And that a lot of IT people frankly don't understand IT very much.

Without shadowing it, I couldn't get anything done. I have to install new (open source) software or packages more or less every day, but IT would expect me to wait for a week for some bureaucracy for each package. IT fights me getting a computer with a specific GPU although it is required to use a library that I need. IT forces a reboot of my laptop in a middle of a conference presentation. IT blocks me from sending Python source code files over email. IT makes my computer boot to take ten minutes. IT forces me to use OneDrive that often simply doesn't work.

Maybe the abomination is not the private projects? Maybe it's the systems architecture?

Re: Why do people still use VBA?

#208

Post by GuB-42 »

Aloha wrote: post #25

The real answer as pointed out in this document is simple - IT Security and Administrative policy in non-technology companies trends towards restriction and justification rather than permissiveness. I work in a role that develops air gapped custom communications system, my title is engineer - and to that end I have a broad cross domain knowledge - including traditional system administration tasks. I have to go thru s…

> IT Security and Administrative policy in non-technology companies trends towards restriction and justification rather than permissiveness.

I work in a tech company and the IT department is like that. The worst part is that IT/security is separate from the operational branch, and they don't care if it impacts our projects. Even though we are the same company, it seems they only care about their own profits (we get billed), we probably would have better service going to competitors, but we can't (obviously). We lost contracts because of it.

Re: Why do people still use VBA?

#209

Post by markphip »

layer8 wrote: post #184

– It’s built in. – The IDE is built in. – The syntax is beginner-friendly. – It’s stable and doesn’t change every six month. – It’s well-documented. – No build steps, it just runs, and fast. – It’s resource-efficient (CPU, RAM). – You can easily create dialogs and forms using the built-in visual GUI builder. – You can break into the built-in debugger from your Office document. – If you want to get fancy, it has inter…

It seems like the bigger concern would be all the important data they have in Lotus Notes, as well as some of the other systems mentioned.

VBA seems like a solid choice compared to where they have their data being stored.

Re: Why do people still use VBA?

#210

Post by layer8 »

omneity wrote: post #203
layer8 wrote: post #184

– It’s built in. – The IDE is built in. – The syntax is beginner-friendly. – It’s stable and doesn’t change every six month. – It’s well-documented. – No build steps, it just runs, and fast. – It’s resource-efficient (CPU, RAM). – You can easily create dialogs and forms using the built-in visual GUI builder. – You can break into the built-in debugger from your Office document. – If you want to get fancy, it has inter…

What would have happened if VBScript had won the DHTML wars?

We’d have VBTypeScript now. ;)
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