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This is a convenient lie developers tell themselves to justify their complexity fetish instead of thinking about how to simplify things. VB dates back to 1991,

This is a convenient lie developers tell themselves to justify their complexity fetish instead of thinking about how to simplify things. VB dates back to 1991, with its last release in 1998. Before popular email, before people wanted high-res photo processing and music file tagging, before people wanted to write their own 3d games, before ordinary people wanted cross-platform tools, when everything was ASCII and that was fine, before people had cloud backups or wanted to cross-post their Wordpress blogs to Twitter, before they wanted to integrate with Philips Hue bulbs or have their code run on an rPI, or integrate with an XML web service or a REST API or download 10GB of mapping data and look for patterns in it. If you're going to argue that the computing landscape is no different to 20 years ago in complexity, and the tasks people want to do are no different, it's going to be a tough argument. But if you do argue that, then you have no problem because VB still exists and you can buy it on eBay. If you think nothing's changed, that should be as good a solution as it ever was, right? Why do people still pipe commandline tools together to do things? Hasn't someone written a program to solve their problem? Do ordinary people do that?

AnIdiotOnTheNet 8y ago
Processing 10GB of data is not fundamentally different from processing 1k of data. Copying data, whether to disk or the internet, again is not fundamentally different. Keeping data consistent was the same problem in 1980 as it is today. All that has changed is the scale. > Do ordinary people do that? Yet another excuse, imagining that the user is some drooling moron who never uses tools correctly and things must be as crap as they are because we have to cater to them. Linux desktop has been targeting this user for over a decade, where has it gotten them?
- jodrellblank 8y ago
  Processing 10GB of data is fundamentally different, in the sense that the data you want to process is going to be more complex - many 1kb files, or a pile of structured map data or weather data or something that you aren't going to want to write your own parser for - there are surely more common data formats now than there were decades ago. Copying data to/from the internet isn't "fundamentally" different, it's normally different. Python requests module, Beautiful Soup, a good XML and JSON library will get you a lot further than plain VB code when working with internet things. It's not only scale which has changed, there's more kinds of things to do, and more existing popular large systems to tie into, and the desire to make use of more existing libraries to build on. Yet another excuse, imagining that the user is some drooling {disinterested person} who never uses tools correctly That pretty much is my experience of non-geeks using computers. things must be as crap as they are because we have to cater to them. Linux desktop has been targeting this user for over a decade, where has it gotten them? As I said, you claim VB is some pinnacle of computing which we've lost, but it's still there. You also claim that nothing has changed and nothing needs to be different, so I'm still at a loss how you can then say that there's nothing today like VB was for normal people. If VB exists and you think nothing is different .. what's wrong?

AnIdiotOnTheNet 8y ago

Processing 10GB of data is not fundamentally different from processing 1k of data. Copying data, whether to disk or the internet, again is not fundamentally different. Keeping data consistent was the same problem in 1980 as it is today. All that has changed is the scale. > Do ordinary people do that? Yet another excuse, imagining that the user is some drooling moron who never uses tools correctly and things must be as crap as they are because we have to cater to them. Linux desktop has been targeting this user for over a decade, where has it gotten them?

jodrellblank 8y ago
Processing 10GB of data is fundamentally different, in the sense that the data you want to process is going to be more complex - many 1kb files, or a pile of structured map data or weather data or something that you aren't going to want to write your own parser for - there are surely more common data formats now than there were decades ago. Copying data to/from the internet isn't "fundamentally" different, it's normally different. Python requests module, Beautiful Soup, a good XML and JSON library will get you a lot further than plain VB code when working with internet things. It's not only scale which has changed, there's more kinds of things to do, and more existing popular large systems to tie into, and the desire to make use of more existing libraries to build on. Yet another excuse, imagining that the user is some drooling {disinterested person} who never uses tools correctly That pretty much is my experience of non-geeks using computers. things must be as crap as they are because we have to cater to them. Linux desktop has been targeting this user for over a decade, where has it gotten them? As I said, you claim VB is some pinnacle of computing which we've lost, but it's still there. You also claim that nothing has changed and nothing needs to be different, so I'm still at a loss how you can then say that there's nothing today like VB was for normal people. If VB exists and you think nothing is different .. what's wrong?