5 ms·

I'd add Visual Basic to your "glue bits together" list. After working on C++ & FORTRAN professionally, Visual Basic was like a breath of fresh air. I remember t

by kitd 4y ago

I'd add Visual Basic to your "glue bits together" list. After working on C++ & FORTRAN professionally, Visual Basic was like a breath of fresh air. I remember thinking "how could programming be this simple". It felt like cheating. Ofc, there's an evil undercurrent to the "any non-technical person can use it". We ended up having to support a tool that some "business analyst" had written. My eyes bled.

clarge1120 4y ago
The redpill in me says MSFT created dotnet to kill VB6. That tool made it too easy (and cheap) to create value through automation.
- numair 4y ago
  A lot of large companies did a tremendous amount of back office using VB6 applications. I remember visiting Disney and seeing it all over the place in the late 90s.
- kome 4y ago
  it's a generalized trend. Python is the new BASIC, but Python is SO much more complicated than BASIC. Web development was easy, now it's impossibly complicated, etc etc... Rebol, Red, tcl/tk are good and easy programming languages, but kinda niche and obscure. I have no idea why computing is getting more complicated instead of easier.
  - marcosdumay 4y ago
    I only disagree on web development. It was never easy. The web always always a mess, and nothing really worked. Today it's a mess, but you can make it work if you know what you are doing. But yes, looks like the web was a trendsetter that pushed things into becoming harder without any good reason. Or maybe the web was just following the trend of the toolmakers all going out business at the early 00's (thanks a lot to Microsoft).
    - Consultant32452 4y ago
      I miss the days when JQuery was the only JS library a person needed to know to do professional web dev. I stuck with web dev through the peak of Struts, but the constant changing of frameworks with (imo) minimal benefit to user experience pushed me to things besides web dev.
    - falcolas 4y ago
      Ironically - given the article we're commenting on - a lot of the early problems with the web were solved, and I hesitate to say it, solved well by Flash. Its insecurity is what really pushed us away from it (well, and that it was a closed sourced Adobe project)
- bottlepalm 4y ago
  To be fair, WinForms is the spiritual successor to VB6, a lot more powerful, and just as productive.
- int_19h 4y ago
  There was nothing particularly easier about VB6 compared to the later VB.NET. VB (5/6) was, effectively, a scripting language designed around the COM object model. .NET originally started its life as "COM 2.0", with VB support consistently a part of the plan, and gradual feature creep turning it into what it became eventually.
vkazanov 4y ago
I remember how the last VisualBasic programmer left the first company I worked for. On one hand, he was ignorant in regards to everything we thought was mandatory for development: version control, code style, code structure. We, young Cpp/Python programmers, despised him. But nothing we had (QT, 2007-2008 web tech, etc) made it possible to spit out a business UI in an hour. To be honest, I still don't see anything comparable.
- TuringTest 4y ago
  > To be honest, I still don't see anything comparable. I think it's just around the corner for those types of applications to come back. And surprisingly, they will come hand in hand with note-taking outliners, not your run-of-the-mill no-code or low-code tools. See for example Obsidian canvas, released this week. I see it as functionally similar to Visual Basic GUI editor, except simpler and easier to edit; and its layout is stored as JSON in a .canvas file. The open-source Logseq is adding similar visual layout templates together with data-recovery primitives. They just need to add the core interactive data widgets (text field, text area, buttons) and expose the cards to a programming language in a end-user accesible way, and you'll have the power of a visual language, except web-integrated and with a really simple way to add data (the outliner editor). [1] https://obsidian.md/canvas https://obsidian.md/canvas
- int_19h 4y ago
  .NET with WinForms could do that just fine in that timeframe (and today - it's still supported), and many VB programmers ended up there. Delphi was another popular contender that's still around.
  - vkazanov 4y ago
    One more thing that changed is a platform situation. Everyone is looking into building crossplatform tools, and MS tools do not really cover this front. Thus the abundance of those browser-wrappers such as Electron. The html/js stack is far from trivial but it really is truly portable. So the new visualbasic has to be different, and I don't think newer ms tools cover this niche.
dheera 4y ago
I feel like Python is starting to get a lot of the same bad rep because non-techies can learn it. It's actually a great language if you want to build stuff really fast. Not everything needs to crunch a billion operations per second and even if you want that, there are several good libraries for that.
- albertzeyer 4y ago
  Yep. Python has potential to support some environment like Visual Basic. But there is no such project, as far as I know. All GUI frameworks are more complex, and there is no nice drag & drop GUI editor build into an easy Python IDE. At least I don't know it. Maybe if you use PyCharm, select some framework, find the right PyCharm plugins for it, you would have sth similar, but still much more difficult to use, and also there is no prebuilt and ready to be used package for such thing.
  - jimnotgym 4y ago
    I have lost count of the number of 'I miss VB6/Flash/Delphi, they were so much more productive' threads on hn! Yet in this community of all the people who could make it happen, we can't make it happen! What are we missing? Time? Money? Co-ordination?
    - albertzeyer 4y ago
      For Delphi, there is Lazarus, which is absolutely great. However, it's somehow really niche? Maybe because Object Pascal is somewhat outdated now?
      - jimnotgym 4y ago
        I don't really know Delphi/Lazurus well enough... but I suppose it is similar to the following... for VB there is Winforms and .NET, which as someone above pointed out is 'much more powerful', but somehow not what people want!
    - int_19h 4y ago
rr808 4y ago
Yep I was going to say the same thing. I write small internal tools for corporates and my team in 2020 is a fraction of the productivity of my team in the 90s. Lots of tools, the complexity is nuts these days.
- bernardv 4y ago
  Totally agree. And as a result, it has become very hard to find young developers who understand GUI usability and standards.
rapind 4y ago
What I loved about VB was how the basic UI was handled seamlessly and yet you could really dig in on optimizing user flow on top of it. It wasn’t pretty, but it was functional, and you could spend your time making sure it felt good. I can still get there with modern tools, but the defaults / conventions in VB are simply superior to anything I’ve worked with since.
chriskanan 4y ago
I spent a huge amount of time coding in VB5 and VB6 in the 1990s and early 2000s during high school and my first years of college for hobby projects. Definitely felt like the most fun language and I was far more productive than in C/C++/Java/Pascal. With some work areas that needed to be optimized could be to be pretty fast when compiled. Everything was integrated and a good debugger. I didn't get the hate. Maybe software engineering folks don't want coding to be fun and productive.

by kitd 4y ago

clarge1120 4y ago

The redpill in me says MSFT created dotnet to kill VB6. That tool made it too easy (and cheap) to create value through automation.

numair 4y ago
A lot of large companies did a tremendous amount of back office using VB6 applications. I remember visiting Disney and seeing it all over the place in the late 90s.
kome 4y ago
it's a generalized trend. Python is the new BASIC, but Python is SO much more complicated than BASIC. Web development was easy, now it's impossibly complicated, etc etc... Rebol, Red, tcl/tk are good and easy programming languages, but kinda niche and obscure. I have no idea why computing is getting more complicated instead of easier.
- marcosdumay 4y ago
  I only disagree on web development. It was never easy. The web always always a mess, and nothing really worked. Today it's a mess, but you can make it work if you know what you are doing. But yes, looks like the web was a trendsetter that pushed things into becoming harder without any good reason. Or maybe the web was just following the trend of the toolmakers all going out business at the early 00's (thanks a lot to Microsoft).
  - Consultant32452 4y ago
    I miss the days when JQuery was the only JS library a person needed to know to do professional web dev. I stuck with web dev through the peak of Struts, but the constant changing of frameworks with (imo) minimal benefit to user experience pushed me to things besides web dev.
  - falcolas 4y ago
    Ironically - given the article we're commenting on - a lot of the early problems with the web were solved, and I hesitate to say it, solved well by Flash. Its insecurity is what really pushed us away from it (well, and that it was a closed sourced Adobe project)
bottlepalm 4y ago
To be fair, WinForms is the spiritual successor to VB6, a lot more powerful, and just as productive.
int_19h 4y ago
There was nothing particularly easier about VB6 compared to the later VB.NET. VB (5/6) was, effectively, a scripting language designed around the COM object model. .NET originally started its life as "COM 2.0", with VB support consistently a part of the plan, and gradual feature creep turning it into what it became eventually.

vkazanov 4y ago

I remember how the last VisualBasic programmer left the first company I worked for. On one hand, he was ignorant in regards to everything we thought was mandatory for development: version control, code style, code structure. We, young Cpp/Python programmers, despised him. But nothing we had (QT, 2007-2008 web tech, etc) made it possible to spit out a business UI in an hour. To be honest, I still don't see anything comparable.

TuringTest 4y ago
> To be honest, I still don't see anything comparable. I think it's just around the corner for those types of applications to come back. And surprisingly, they will come hand in hand with note-taking outliners, not your run-of-the-mill no-code or low-code tools. See for example Obsidian canvas, released this week. I see it as functionally similar to Visual Basic GUI editor, except simpler and easier to edit; and its layout is stored as JSON in a .canvas file. The open-source Logseq is adding similar visual layout templates together with data-recovery primitives. They just need to add the core interactive data widgets (text field, text area, buttons) and expose the cards to a programming language in a end-user accesible way, and you'll have the power of a visual language, except web-integrated and with a really simple way to add data (the outliner editor). [1] https://obsidian.md/canvas https://obsidian.md/canvas
int_19h 4y ago
.NET with WinForms could do that just fine in that timeframe (and today - it's still supported), and many VB programmers ended up there. Delphi was another popular contender that's still around.
- vkazanov 4y ago
  One more thing that changed is a platform situation. Everyone is looking into building crossplatform tools, and MS tools do not really cover this front. Thus the abundance of those browser-wrappers such as Electron. The html/js stack is far from trivial but it really is truly portable. So the new visualbasic has to be different, and I don't think newer ms tools cover this niche.

dheera 4y ago

I feel like Python is starting to get a lot of the same bad rep because non-techies can learn it. It's actually a great language if you want to build stuff really fast. Not everything needs to crunch a billion operations per second and even if you want that, there are several good libraries for that.

albertzeyer 4y ago
Yep. Python has potential to support some environment like Visual Basic. But there is no such project, as far as I know. All GUI frameworks are more complex, and there is no nice drag & drop GUI editor build into an easy Python IDE. At least I don't know it. Maybe if you use PyCharm, select some framework, find the right PyCharm plugins for it, you would have sth similar, but still much more difficult to use, and also there is no prebuilt and ready to be used package for such thing.
- jimnotgym 4y ago
  I have lost count of the number of 'I miss VB6/Flash/Delphi, they were so much more productive' threads on hn! Yet in this community of all the people who could make it happen, we can't make it happen! What are we missing? Time? Money? Co-ordination?
  - albertzeyer 4y ago
    For Delphi, there is Lazarus, which is absolutely great. However, it's somehow really niche? Maybe because Object Pascal is somewhat outdated now?
    - jimnotgym 4y ago
      I don't really know Delphi/Lazurus well enough... but I suppose it is similar to the following... for VB there is Winforms and .NET, which as someone above pointed out is 'much more powerful', but somehow not what people want!
  - int_19h 4y ago

rr808 4y ago

Yep I was going to say the same thing. I write small internal tools for corporates and my team in 2020 is a fraction of the productivity of my team in the 90s. Lots of tools, the complexity is nuts these days.

bernardv 4y ago
Totally agree. And as a result, it has become very hard to find young developers who understand GUI usability and standards.

rapind 4y ago

What I loved about VB was how the basic UI was handled seamlessly and yet you could really dig in on optimizing user flow on top of it. It wasn’t pretty, but it was functional, and you could spend your time making sure it felt good. I can still get there with modern tools, but the defaults / conventions in VB are simply superior to anything I’ve worked with since.

chriskanan 4y ago

I spent a huge amount of time coding in VB5 and VB6 in the 1990s and early 2000s during high school and my first years of college for hobby projects. Definitely felt like the most fun language and I was far more productive than in C/C++/Java/Pascal. With some work areas that needed to be optimized could be to be pretty fast when compiled. Everything was integrated and a good debugger. I didn't get the hate. Maybe software engineering folks don't want coding to be fun and productive.