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Ask HN: Why did Visual Basic die?

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Re: Ask HN: Why did Visual Basic die?

#341

Post by eternityforest »

gumballindie wrote: post #150
eternityforest wrote: post #136

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 bu…

> with reactive web tech, typescript I very much doubt. Actually reactive frameworks such as react and languages that transpile in other languages such as trypescript are the reason they couldn't. These overcomplicated, seemingly well architected, tools are in fact just a fractal of poor design.

I've never seen anything else that even comes close to working that well for making a responsive GUI. With everything else you spend half your time manually adding and removing things from list view controls and such.

There are some pretty big architecture issues. Like the fact JS and TS are still separate things(Google tried to fix that with native Dart in the browser, looking back it would have been amazing) and the fact that there are dozens of reactive frameworks that come and go.

Most of that wouldn't exist/would be papered over so nobody noticed, in an end to end, "We plan to not break this for the next 25 years" tool like VB or Excel.

But everthing new comes with a move fast and break things expectation, people are less interested in creating new 30-year standards now, and that doesn't seem to be how stuff is done. Complex stuff is considered disposable these days.

Re: Ask HN: Why did Visual Basic die?

#342

Post by walnutclosefarm »

SoftTalker wrote: post #184
j-a-a-p wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Same here, we did a VB6 project that allowed the customer to chat with their remote mortgage advisor using a webcam, around '98. The client was supposed to go to a local branch of the bank and then connect to the banks HQ. I have also wondered why the software industry with the arrival of Internet went away from all these excellent tools. Not just VB6, but remember all the 4GL and model driven development tools. All…

It was all about the difficulty of actually installing software on all those desktops. The web eliminated all of that. And it was so easy for ODBC and other configs to get trampled on by users and installers running amok over existing settings. Everyone was root on their PC in those days. The opportunity for users to screw things up accidentally was everywhere.

Well, that, and all those wonderful apps were inherently client-server architectures, with the business logic on the client. Nobody ever built a properly factored, with stateless layering, and high-end scalability on such an architecture. Just trying to keep 1000 clients in sync, so your business logic remained consistent could drive you to distraction; in a truly distributed product with tens or hundreds of thousands of clients, it was impossible.

Re: Ask HN: Why did Visual Basic die?

#343

Post by cstejerean »

SamuelAdams wrote: post #309
emodendroket wrote: post #278

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A lot of people who wrote VB weren’t serious/professional programmers and VB.NET was too complex for them. For the serious programmer group, the stink of “VB” tainted it right out of the gate (despite having complete feature parity for a long time VB.NET jobs always paid notably less than C# ones). So it was kind of a compromise that satisfied nobody.

I think today python fills that void - people who are not serious programmers but need to put something together. Think academics, data analysts, etc. And since Python is cross platform and easy to get started with it is a lot more attractive than VB.

It's significantly harder to put together a quick GUI application in Python than it used to be in the VB6 days. Just getting all the dependencies installed can be a pain, and then good luck trying to add another button to that app say 2 years later, chances are nothing will build anymore.

Re: Ask HN: Why did Visual Basic die?

#344

Post by Blackthorn »

cstejerean wrote: post #343
SamuelAdams wrote: post #309

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think today python fills that void - people who are not serious programmers but need to put something together. Think academics, data analysts, etc. And since Python is cross platform and easy to get started with it is a lot more attractive than VB.

It's significantly harder to put together a quick GUI application in Python than it used to be in the VB6 days. Just getting all the dependencies installed can be a pain, and then good luck trying to add another button to that app say 2 years later, chances are nothing will build anymore.

Honestly it's harder to put together a quick GUI application in anything than it was in the VB6 days. By losing VB6, we've lost a lot of power and ability to do GUI things quickly.

Re: Ask HN: Why did Visual Basic die?

#345

Post by redeeman »

wvenable wrote: post #298
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…

If Microsoft had simply ported Visual Basic in a compatible way to .NET history would have been very different. What's the point of the common language runtime when all the common languages are just reskinned C#? This was a major missed opportunity for Microsoft -- if they had brought Visual Basic proper in .NET it would have given hundreds of thousands of applications a smooth upgrade path into modern development. I…

> It also would have given the entire Office suite an upgrade path from VBA to .NET -- something they've still not managed.

> To this day, our office still has one critical commercial 3rd party application written in Visual Basic. It's replacement is, of course, a web app written in .NET.

seems like they did, they just didnt care if it remained in office, and it seems the author didnt care that they got screwed over by microsoft :)

Re: Ask HN: Why did Visual Basic die?

#346

Post by safaaus »

nvy wrote: post #176
bonzini wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Serious question: what is a good alternative to Access (edit: to build a GUI frontend to a database)? The database design tools and basic forms were incredibly easy to use, and there were very good tutorials for everything else. LibreOffice Base is different and not even close in comprehensiveness, and there seems to be nothing replacing it that isn't a super expensive SaaS.

Equally serious question: what is the use case for Access? It's been installed on every corp workstation I've had and it's never been useful. In my experience either Excel can do it or you need a real programming language/database.

Prototyping - occasionally when starting out on a big in-house development project, we'd task one or two guys to build a prototype in access to understand the challenges, functionality, data issues and get user feedback on what worked and what didn't. Invest 3-4 weeks of effort that saved us months of effort from the project overall and de-risked the project substantially. One time it back-fired a bit when the users liked the access proto-type more than the final system (pushed the envelope a bit too much and the performance was very poor), but typically got plenty of value out of it.

Re: Ask HN: Why did Visual Basic die?

#347

Post by no_wizard »

mamcx wrote: post #337
bonzini wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Serious question: what is a good alternative to Access (edit: to build a GUI frontend to a database)? The database design tools and basic forms were incredibly easy to use, and there were very good tutorials for everything else. LibreOffice Base is different and not even close in comprehensiveness, and there seems to be nothing replacing it that isn't a super expensive SaaS.

> what is a good alternative to Access (or Fox, I add) Nothing. Access is(was) in fact a worse alternative to Fox: - Much worse DB engine, and that is saying a lot (FoxPro db can and get corrupted. A typical functionality that was added to any fox codebase was a utility to fix it) - MUCH MUCH worse programming language (VB) that is neither good as-is, much less as a data-programing language. Fox/dbase is the only dat…

Looks alot like Lua!

and thats not a bad thing per se

Re: Ask HN: Why did Visual Basic die?

#348

Post by BlueThoughts »

SoftTalker wrote: post #184
j-a-a-p wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Same here, we did a VB6 project that allowed the customer to chat with their remote mortgage advisor using a webcam, around '98. The client was supposed to go to a local branch of the bank and then connect to the banks HQ. I have also wondered why the software industry with the arrival of Internet went away from all these excellent tools. Not just VB6, but remember all the 4GL and model driven development tools. All…

It was all about the difficulty of actually installing software on all those desktops. The web eliminated all of that. And it was so easy for ODBC and other configs to get trampled on by users and installers running amok over existing settings. Everyone was root on their PC in those days. The opportunity for users to screw things up accidentally was everywhere.

My mid-1990's employer had a solution for the installer dilema.

All of our VB programs, com objects and assets were loaded into a MS SQL database table. When our generic launcher program started it would query the database, figure out what app the customer had purchased and downloaded the necessary objects (if the cache was stale). If we accidentally uploaded a bad version, a rollback to a previous version only took a few administrative clicks.

A good part of my job was to make sure that the companies domain structure and network settings were sensible.

No disagreement about how the web is still easier/cheaper to administer from a centralized point.

Re: Ask HN: Why did Visual Basic die?

#350

Post by no_wizard »

bonzini wrote: post #256
sebazzz wrote: post #241

Earlier quoted context omitted.

PowerApps probably, and with the transition to the cloud Microsoft will probably not invest too much into stuff that can't run well in a web browser and mobile app.

A monthly subscription is a non starter for charities and also it needs a work or school account.

Last I interacted with Microsoft they were quite generous here. They have special pricing for non-profits and they definitely have a whole different structural thing for schools
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