Will VBA Die? (2019) • Hacker News Board

Re: Will VBA Die? (2019)

#61

Post by mandelbrotwurst » Fri, Feb 28, 2020, 2:40 AM UTC

bilekas wrote: post #59

Ididntdothis wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am old. I have no idea what interperated is :)

:) Not sure if you're joking or not, so I'll be more rude and ask if you've ever written a compiler for the fun of it.. That will gauge your real age ;)

I'm not sure, but that person may have been attempting to make a joke about your misspelling of "interpreted".

Re: Will VBA Die? (2019)

#62

Post by markus_zhang » Fri, Feb 28, 2020, 2:57 AM UTC

Excel is one of the reasons I want to leave a career of Business Analyst behind.

Regardless of the process, the last step is always to dump the data into Excel and spend tons of time to create good-looking charts and tables. It usually takes me a full day to do that plus write wiki pages in Confluence (another pain point).

I just want to stay away from spreadsheet -> which means I need to get further from business and get a more technical position.

Re: Will VBA Die? (2019)

#63

Post by kevas » Fri, Feb 28, 2020, 3:12 AM UTC

Nah... why should it? It works and it does what it needs to do and more if you decide to hook into the Windows API or Mac’s API.

Want to parse 500mb structured XML file? Okay. Takes 3 seconds or so.

I had a lot of fun creating a full featured & modern look & feel application using Excel’s VBA runtime as my platform. Sure... I had to create everything from scratch, but learned so much while doing it. Kind of miss it at times since I now work with Java.

By the time I moved jobs, the codebase was +30k lines and even built an auto-updater, auto-installer, diagnostic, and AD type of authentication for the app, but most importantly saved tens of thousands of hours by automating reporting, analysis, detect errors, and querying that analysts, accounting, and some BI’s would do as part of their normal work.

VBA is great for analysts to work in Excel all day & every day who want to get into programming a little more, but want to have it apply directly to their daily work.

Now.... I wish Access does die...

Re: Will VBA Die? (2019)

#64

Post by CinchWrench » Fri, Feb 28, 2020, 3:20 AM UTC

kevas wrote: post #63

Nah... why should it? It works and it does what it needs to do and more if you decide to hook into the Windows API or Mac’s API. Want to parse 500mb structured XML file? Okay. Takes 3 seconds or so. I had a lot of fun creating a full featured & modern look & feel application using Excel’s VBA runtime as my platform. Sure... I had to create everything from scratch, but learned so much while doing it. Kind of miss it a…

This is so cool. VBA is a gateway drug, for sure. It was my first foray into programming, specifically to solve a problem I knew I could formulate as a shortest path problem. That's led me on quite a journey.

The only thing I wish they'd do is update the editor. I like that it feels responsive, I just don't like the lack of line numbers and themes.

Re: Will VBA Die? (2019)

#65

Post by jbeam » Fri, Feb 28, 2020, 3:24 AM UTC

dokka wrote: post #27

I'm working on an excell addin right now. It doesn't use VBA (it uses microsoft interop libs for .NET) And I have zero interest in using VBA, but I will admit, it would have been much easier to do this project in VBA instead of C#. Debugging would have been easier. I could debug inside the VBA code-behind instead of Attaching to the excel process in Visual Studio. Deployment would have been easier. I could make an .x…

I’m the other way. Started a large project in VBA once, jumped over to C# interop and never looked back. I found the libraries to map fairly well to the same named functions in VBA when it came to worksheet manipulation. My biggest issue was that the interop has quite a bit of latency. You really want to accomplish as much in one call as you can (i.e. read whole ranges into an array instead of looping through cell by cell).

Edit: If this is internal, you can also set up one click deployment to some folder on the network that will auto update the add on for end users.

Re: Will VBA Die? (2019)

#66

Post by zchrykng » Fri, Feb 28, 2020, 3:40 AM UTC

I hate VBA with a passion, but on the other hand it saves me many many hours every month through my ability to automate tasks. I would love for almost any language to replace it, but there has to be some kind of replacement if it goes away.

Re: Will VBA Die? (2019)

#67

Post by [deleted] » Fri, Feb 28, 2020, 3:45 AM UTC

rosybox wrote: post #19

Ididntdothis wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed. JavaScript has no real upside here besides being fashionable. whereas built-in C# with access to the .Net framework would be really powerful.

JavaScript has a huge upside because a lot of people already know JavaScript. The more tools and platforms switch to JavaScript the more of an office superhero users are when they know something about the language. The productivity of employees will jump off the charts. When you send someone to train for one thing that utilizes JavaScript you get the benefit that those skills may also happen to work with something el…

[deleted]

Re: Will VBA Die? (2019)

#68

Post by chaostheory » Fri, Feb 28, 2020, 3:46 AM UTC

Ididntdothis wrote: post #23

rosybox wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

JavaScript has a huge upside because a lot of people already know JavaScript. The more tools and platforms switch to JavaScript the more of an office superhero users are when they know something about the language. The productivity of employees will jump off the charts. When you send someone to train for one thing that utilizes JavaScript you get the benefit that those skills may also happen to work with something el…

Most potential users of VBA don’t know JavaScript or any other language. And VB is way more accessible than JavaScript.

My guess is that they will retire from having to program one day.

Re: Will VBA Die? (2019)

#69

Post by chaostheory » Fri, Feb 28, 2020, 3:48 AM UTC

NeoBasilisk wrote: post #20

rosybox wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

JavaScript has a huge upside because a lot of people already know JavaScript. The more tools and platforms switch to JavaScript the more of an office superhero users are when they know something about the language. The productivity of employees will jump off the charts. When you send someone to train for one thing that utilizes JavaScript you get the benefit that those skills may also happen to work with something el…

At some point, I hope we can get past this argument. Learning a new language for rudimentary tasks is not particularly hard. I'm not sure why people decided that JavaScript of all things was what we had to all latch onto.

Because it’s the new Franca lingua of programming. Everyone knows it whether they like it or not. There’s value in not have to switch context while programming. Also there’s typescript which makes JavaScript usable. I don’t like JavaScript either but typescript isn’t terrible and the ecosystem is much bigger than any Microsoft programming ecosystem which results in less reinventions of the wheel. MS has also been treating JavaScript as a 1st class citizen on Windows

Re: Will VBA Die? (2019)

#70

Post by gliese1337 » Fri, Feb 28, 2020, 3:48 AM UTC

As far as I'm concerned, JavaScript (or at least JScript, MicroSoft's proprietary reimagining) replaced VBA 13 years ago. I haven't had to do anything programming with Excel for rather a long while, but way back in 2007 I was already writing JScript programs to automate spreadsheet tasks.