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Ask HN: Why did Visual Basic die?

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Re: Ask HN: Why did Visual Basic die?

#321

Post by rlpb »

timdietrich wrote: post #314

For anyone looking for a modern alternative to Visual Basic, you might want to take a look at Xojo. Xojo's a rapid application development platform (both a language and an IDE) that you can use to develop desktop apps (for macOS, Windows, Linux), Web apps, mobile apps (for iOS and Android), as well as console apps. It's been around for more than 20 years, and some of you might remember it from back when it was called…

Talking of alternatives, I'm also aware of Gambas, though I've never tried it: http://gambas.sourceforge.net/

Re: Ask HN: Why did Visual Basic die?

#322

Post by pcdoodle »

Another fun story:

A strip club was asking for a camera system and pos system in 2006. I already had a nice PCI based capture solution for the CCTV system but the POS software was still an unknown.

When I learned that the average cost per terminal was going to run me $700/ea., I decided to write my own POS in VB6 (Along with Receipt printer stuff, USB Card Swipe Stuff, Authorize.net Etc). This was completed in about 1 month while still living in my moms basement.

We had a lot of fun sitting in the security room popping the cash drawers as a prank and having the girls complain over the radio about them being possessed. Long live VB6!

Re: Ask HN: Why did Visual Basic die?

#323

Post by danzk »

babypuncher wrote: post #286
TedDoesntTalk wrote: post #240

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> As someone who was writing Visual Basic.NET back when it came out, there was no upside to it over writing in C# Sure there was: C# didn't exist yet. It didn't exist for many years to come. It simply wasn't an option. C/C++ was, however.

You may be confusing Visual Basic .NET with Visual Basic 6 and its predecessors. C# actually predates VB.NET by about a year. VB.NET may be syntactically similar to VB6, but under the hood they were so different that migrating projects to VB.NET essentially meant a complete rewrite.

Visual Studio had a built-in migration utility which could get you 80-90% there. However if the original VB6 was spaghetti code written without Option Strict and Option Explicit enabled you had much bigger problems.

The biggest breaking change was the removal of the global Printer Object so any printing code needed a complete rewrite.

Re: Ask HN: Why did Visual Basic die?

#324

Post by bmitc »

MichaelMoser123 wrote: post #312
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'…

>The other thing is that C# consistently adds features to itself that are inspired by F#, since F# already implements these features on the CLR, thus showing their viability. So what happens is that C# continually approaches a more bloated language with a subset of it being a poor copy of F# C# and F# sometimes remind me another pair of languages: Java and Scala.

F# started out as integrating much better and being very selective of features, whereas Scala has been happy to add all sorts of features, to my understanding. F# has been feature complete for a while, mainly getting quality of life improvements and updating to maintain C# compatibility.

Re: Ask HN: Why did Visual Basic die?

#325

Post by bmitc »

themerone wrote: post #99
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'…

The F# situation is not comparable to VB.NET. VB.NET was just C# semantics with a VB like syntax. From the beginning it didn't serve any purpose except to make VB Fans feel slightly more at home.

I think it's comparable in the sense of what I was pointing out: Microsoft only truly cares about C# and only keeps F# and VB.NET going just enough.

Re: Ask HN: Why did Visual Basic die?

#326

Post by pcdoodle »

rlpb wrote: post #321
timdietrich wrote: post #314

For anyone looking for a modern alternative to Visual Basic, you might want to take a look at Xojo. Xojo's a rapid application development platform (both a language and an IDE) that you can use to develop desktop apps (for macOS, Windows, Linux), Web apps, mobile apps (for iOS and Android), as well as console apps. It's been around for more than 20 years, and some of you might remember it from back when it was called…

Talking of alternatives, I'm also aware of Gambas, though I've never tried it: http://gambas.sourceforge.net/

Xojo is much better but costs $$$. I don't write software all day so I pay for a license every few years if there's new features I want.

Re: Ask HN: Why did Visual Basic die?

#328

Post by failuser »

jenscow wrote: post #223
JackMorgan wrote: post #193

The productivity wasn't really that good. Rose tinted glasses. All the VB apps I've seen (and still get paid to maintain/rewrite to this day in the finance world) are an order of magnitude simpler than even a simple modern website. They often only have a few users, no devops automation, no deployment automation, terrible logging, terrible instrumentation, no tests, unacceptable access control, tons of failure edge ca…

You should think about what the alternative was at the time: Mostly C/C++ VB6 you would have connected to the db by the end of the day. C/C++ you're still trying to handle WM_ERASEBKGND

Borland was the alternative. You could throw together a C++ database application in a day. And if you used Delphi you even could not justify a coffee break by the long compile time.

Re: Ask HN: Why did Visual Basic die?

#329

Post by schmookeeg »

eli wrote: post #65
schmookeeg wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Healthcare and insurance too! I transform into some glorious magical elf when I volunteer to do the VBA tasks nobody else understands or can lower themselves to do. You can make Excel do some real wacky stuff. I have a spreadsheet that actually calls out to exec() to run a curl POST on commandline and consume REST API endpoints, parse the results, and update the spreadsheet -- why on earth?? because the API was ready…

Pretty sure you can access a REST API from VBA without resorting to exec()

We support both mac and pc excel -- the mac VBA is seriously gimped.
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