Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Will VBA Die? (2019)

thespreadsheetguru.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

71–80 of 170 posts

Re: Will VBA Die? (2019)

#71

Post by tracker1 »

JavaScript, for better or worse, is probably the most widely used language out there, by nature of being the language in the browser. The push for cross platform, mobile and web with frameworks that leverage it have leaned in on and expanded JS greatly. The engines are highly optimized (more than any other scripting language as feature rich), cross platform and nearly ubiquitous.

VBA just isn't. Anything not JS is just about a non-starter for the web versions of these applications, and that's where things are headed. If you're on Linux it's probably the only option in the space for a while.

JS is pretty decent, the ecosystem is massive, and you have the option of TypeScript if you want something more formal. Guessing everything MS offers will actually be written in TS, just consumable in plain JS or TS.

Re: Will VBA Die? (2019)

#72

Post by bilekas »

mandelbrotwurst wrote: post #61
bilekas wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

:) 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".

ah.. Well colour me silly! ;) Well played!

Re: Will VBA Die? (2019)

#73

Post by tracker1 »

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.

It kind of won in a lot of ways... biggest package ecosystem. The most developers using it. Highly optimized runtime. Supports the use of OO, Functional and Procedural paradigms. Able to run in the browser for online versions. Cross platform and nearly ubiquitous.

Re: Will VBA Die? (2019)

#74

Post by tracker1 »

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.

On that I agree... Python would probably be a better option if there weren't a need for cross platform support including in-browser. Also, I'm not sure if there's a good path from Python to JS or Wasm for browser usage.

I love JS, but it's not that accessible and a poor first language for people. I just enjoy the shear flexibility of it.

Re: Will VBA Die? (2019)

#75

Post by markus_zhang »

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…

However, it would take a lot of effort to maintain that 30K+ lines of VBA application. But I think that's because the infrastructure at that time was archaic. If it's today you would probably ditch Access for SQL Server and build reports with something more modern.

Re: Will VBA Die? (2019)

#76

Post by markus_zhang »

CinchWrench wrote: post #64
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.

Try the rubber duck extension:

http://rubberduckvba.com/

Re: Will VBA Die? (2019)

#78

Post by [deleted] »

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)

#79

Post by dswalter »

markus_zhang wrote: post #62

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 an…

I think you may find R an excellent tool/ecosystem for that kind of work.

Re: Will VBA Die? (2019)

#80

Post by Wowfunhappy »

bilekas wrote: post #49
unnouinceput wrote: post #45

Quote: "What Will Replace VBA? Short answer: JavaScript. "; and author follows with some logic about JS vs VBA using cross-platform. Except this will never happen: 1 - M$ loves backward compatibility. It's what keeps their software being sold all these times. Worse case JS will have bigger user share and that's it, but M$ will never cut VBA out. 2 - Also majority of business is done on Windows. Cross-platform means a…

1) They are paid to support their own tech, when they drop one (Silverlight for example) it can be a serious hit for a buisiness. 2) Yes, but it is changing thanks in part to dotNet core understanding this too. So we should see some benefits across the board for everyone. 3) Well, like PHP back when it was the golden boy against Perl, it's up to the developers to decide the direction of the language itself. Browsers…

> They are paid to support their own tech, when they drop one (Silverlight for example) it can be a serious hit for a buisiness.

...but you can still download and run Silverlight.

Fun fact: if you load up Netflix in a browser that's too old to support the html5 player, they'll prompt you to install the Silverlight plugin. https://help.netflix.com/en/node/23742

Post reply on HN