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Ask HN: Why did Visual Basic die?

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Re: Ask HN: Why did Visual Basic die?

#381

Post by Spooky23 »

jopsen wrote: post #339
emodendroket wrote: post #317

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As long as you don’t care about stuff like maintainability or logging sure. The issue is that a lot of times businesses outgrow their bespoke Access app or whatever and then it’s a huge headache to untangle the reliance on it and go more robust. Of course if that never happens it’s great and frees up developers’ time for higher-value work.

> The issue is that a lot of times businesses outgrow their bespoke Access app or whatever... > Of course if that never happens it’s great.. It could also be argued that outgrowing your initial business app is good thing. Lots of business don't outgrow it, because they don't grow :) Indeed, it might be reasonable not to invest too much upfront, before you have scale and can afford to build stuff you won't outgrow.

The issue is there’s no engineering process around it, even in a shitty organization where the “engineering” is garbage.

One place I helped out at had a pretty awesome access app for doing some business functions. Way better than the Oracle whatever they failed to replace it with.

The problem was, nobody was willing to claim ownership. The business guy who wrote it was long gone, and IT would not accept an Access app.

Re: Ask HN: Why did Visual Basic die?

#382

Post by Turskarama »

sn_master wrote: post #368
Blackthorn wrote: post #344

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

WinForms in C# was pretty decent tbh. Not so sure about WCF/Metro/Modern and whatever it is now that Microsoft been releasing. They just stopped caring about consistent UI for apps on Windows altogether since ~2010 or so.

You say was but winforms is still supported in VS2022 and is probably my go-to if I need to hack together a small windows program.

Re: Ask HN: Why did Visual Basic die?

#383

Post by mcmoor »

mdeeks wrote: post #251
kdmccormick wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Lol, my first programming gig as a teenager was performing a VB6 -> VB.NET "upgrade" of a 200K sloc legacy desktop application, which obviously ended up being a total rewrite. Everything in my career since then has seemed easy in comparison.

If this was mine, I'm so sorry :) Just kidding, I actually know my VB6 code is still running in prod. VB6 did let me learn to program very valuable utilities from scratch, with practically no programming experience. I probably owe my entire career to it and VBA. I took a C++ course once and it nearly turned me off of coding completely. VB6 saved me.

I learnt VB6 when I'm still 10 years old and all seems so simple and magical. Then I encounter "Visual Basic" again in high school and it's almost unrecognizable with all the C# nonsenses. I still don't enjoy programming GUI like I was in VB6.

Re: Ask HN: Why did Visual Basic die?

#384

Post by ChicagoDave »

serf wrote: post #149
ChicagoDave wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Devs don’t design user interfaces anymore. There are separate disciplines for user experience, graphic design, front-end development, API development, and data storage choices. There’s no reason to have a drag and drop UI builder anymore.

not everything is a team effort, and the desire espoused all over this thread for an equivalency clearly demonstrates that there is a 'market' there. when some small developer is making a silly one-off app for a mom&pop local store to facilitate a one-off kind of task they aren't interested in handing off work and splitting meager profits. not every company has the whole "front-end/back-end/devops/ux/design/managemen…

There was a time when shareware ruled the world before the World Wide Web. VB was king. Even corporate America was all in on VB, Powerbuilder, and Delphi.

But once the Internet truly arrived and building complex, distributed, highly interconnected systems became normal, the tools were only going to get more sophisticated.

Re: Ask HN: Why did Visual Basic die?

#385

Post by ChicagoDave »

lotsoweiners wrote: post #258
ChicagoDave wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Devs don’t design user interfaces anymore. There are separate disciplines for user experience, graphic design, front-end development, API development, and data storage choices. There’s no reason to have a drag and drop UI builder anymore.

You should tell my employer, state Government, this.

I’ve seen an upswing in state government software engineering sophistication. Mayhaps it hasn’t reached you yet.

Re: Ask HN: Why did Visual Basic die?

#386

Post by emodendroket »

MichaelZuo wrote: post #338
emodendroket wrote: post #317

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As long as you don’t care about stuff like maintainability or logging sure. The issue is that a lot of times businesses outgrow their bespoke Access app or whatever and then it’s a huge headache to untangle the reliance on it and go more robust. Of course if that never happens it’s great and frees up developers’ time for higher-value work.

I don't get the relation here?, most businesses care somewhat, and certainly the better run businesses do quite a bit, so they'll make sure to record down everything important about the software.

So when it goes wrong in many predictable ways it’s a nightmare. All the stuff software engineers put around software to make it reliable, fault tolerant, and generally having the expected behavior is not just for laughs but the result of hard-won experience.

Re: Ask HN: Why did Visual Basic die?

#387

Post by xet7 »

bonzini wrote: post #154
mamcx wrote: post #134

The reason is even bigger than just VB. MS at the time just decide to fully kill the "enthusiast" developer and the "single/truly small" team developer. This is mostly covered under the "RAD" umbrella. It kills VB, FoxPro, and now more evidently, Access (more like let it slowly die). .NET + Visual Studio + Sql Server are not a substitute in this market. Them are for "professional developer"/"a small cog in a big mach…

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.

Maybe:

a) https://www.nubuilder.com

b) https://gambas.sourceforge.net/en/main.html

Re: Ask HN: Why did Visual Basic die?

#388

Post by emodendroket »

sn_master wrote: post #368
Blackthorn wrote: post #344

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

WinForms in C# was pretty decent tbh. Not so sure about WCF/Metro/Modern and whatever it is now that Microsoft been releasing. They just stopped caring about consistent UI for apps on Windows altogether since ~2010 or so.

WinForms is fine but it makes it way too easy to put all your behavior in the code behind instead of doing things nicely. Which I guess is what you want for a non-programmer tool but it is a hassle for me. Either way the .NET UI situation is a mess and I’ve never seen the sense in picking up the latest flavor of the month since it will be out of favor by the time I have occasion to use it.

Re: Ask HN: Why did Visual Basic die?

#389

Post by nextaccountic »

analog31 wrote: post #295
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.

That was me. I wrote what I affectionately call "crapware," which are small apps that solve a problem but are not intended for use at scale. There was a lot of this stuff, such as little database queries, or hacking together a few industrial sensors with a crude display. Businesses ran on crapware. Maybe they still do. A few thousand lines of code that I wrote for a manufacturing fixture ran bug-free for more than a…

what you called crapware is just scripting, but with a gui rather than running in terminal

it's like a quick and dirty shell script or what once could be a tcl or perl script, but today would most probably be a python script

Re: Ask HN: Why did Visual Basic die?

#390

Post by euos »

mike_d wrote: post #185
nvy wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Access was an app you had installed on your workstation but never opened because in the backend every late 90s early 2000s desktop app was using it as its data backend. Between Excel (with no functional API to use for storage) and a "real database" (your users now need to ask IT to deploy SQLServer) was a use case of app just needs to store persistent data for a single user.

I remember there was at least one video game (some turn-based tactics game, don't recall the name) that had Access as a savegame format. It was very convenient to edit the save file.
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