10 ms·

You know why Visual Basic was the best programming language ever made? Because it wasn't a programming language. Nerds just can't wrap their heads around this

You know why Visual Basic was the best programming language ever made? Because it wasn't a programming language. Nerds just can't wrap their heads around this idea: no normal person wants to be a programmer. But they do want to make little custom things to help them get stuff done in life. Just like nobody wants to be a plumber, but they do want to be able to fix their faucet.

zubairq 4y ago
Wish I could +100 this comment!
Pamar 4y ago
Sorta like Excel, then?
- deafpolygon 4y ago
  And Access! That's one amazing piece of software.
  - fredsmith219 4y ago
    Access could easily become a victim of its own success if the dataset got too large. I made some money off of a couple projects where that happened. I had to convert them to sqlserver to both handle the data load and for true multiuser.
    - deafpolygon 4y ago
      That is true. People don't understand that there is an upper limit to Access before you run into issues - but it's fairly large.. what was it? 4GB? Edit: 2gb!
      - philbarr 4y ago
        Aaah - back in the day when we used to link 26 Access databases together, one for the first letter of a customer's surname... :)
        whstl 4y ago
        You can add "built a custom database partitioning system" to your resumé. :)
      - whstl 4y ago
        Funny: back in the late 90s I ran a quite large (for the time) discussion board and everything was stored in an Access MDB file, similar to how people try to do today with SQLite. I didn't know better, that's how I though things worked. It worked quite well for several years, until of course I reached a limit (which was much smaller than 4GB), and I had to delete old posts.
      - lproven 4y ago
        It's worse than that. The thing that imposes these limitations is the somewhat primitive DB engine for Access, which is codenamed MS Jet: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Access_Database_Engine https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Access_Database_Engine But the big that MS & MS fans don't like to mention is that MS Exchange Server uses a version of the same storage engine. It's not mentioned even once in these Wikipedia articles, for instance, but if you look, you will find telltale giveaways such as Exchange store size limitations: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Exchange_Server https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Exchange_Server https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Microsoft_Exchange_Server https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Microsoft_Exchange_... However, if you dig a little, you'll find that the underlying storage engine is also codenamed "Jet": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extensible_Storage_Engine https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extensible_Storage_Engine Jet Red vs Jet Blue. Totally different, honest. These days, it's also used in trivial unimportant Windows subsystems such as -- er -- Active Directory, Windows Update, and the Windows Search indices. Yes, the fragile, essentially single-user, easily-corrupted Access DB engine is an integral part of Windows Server. Which is a bit odd considering MS also owns SQL Server (bought in from Sybase), and could in principle use that instead, which does not have these built-in limitations and is rather more robust. Access was in part built in response to Lotus Approach, which brought Claris Filemaker-like simplicity to Windows end-user databases. MS could not tolerate that, so built its own Approach-killer, which was vastly more complex. It acquired FoxPro, a dBase III/IV clone, for its very fast indexing functionality, which was bolted onto MS Cirrus to make Access, and the rest of FoxPro went largely unmaintained until it could be discontinued. Exchange Server of course replaced MS Mail, which was also bought in and was previously called Network Courier from Consumers Software. Other MS purchases include Powerpoint, Frontpage, Visual BASIC, and Visio. There is a general pattern evidence in 1990s MS software which isn't universal but widespread. If it's lean, mean, simple, fast, or elegant, it was bought in. If it's overcomplex, fragile, has bizarre limitations for non-obvious reasons, and needs careful maintenance, it was built in-house, probably in response to a successful competing product.
        jjkaczor 4y ago
        Sigh - don't get me started on Jet engine DB corruption... You wink at it, over a network with more than a single user - and you have a chance of corruption...
    - kwhitefoot 4y ago
      When I worked with Access it was normal to separate the database into separate front end and back end. Then when the quantity of data or latency got too large you could easily convert that to SQL Server.
  - bena 4y ago
    No. Fuck Access. Access is a useless piece of software that serves no purpose well. Either your data is small enough to be managed by Excel or your data is complex enough to be better served by a database and frontend. Dealing with the idiosyncrasies of Access is never worth it.
    - cutler 4y ago
      So how do you build a desktop database with a staff user interface for a small business running on a couple of Windows desktops?
      - anthk 4y ago
        Lazarus + SQLite. Problem solved.
        snapcaster 4y ago
        Why won't you accept this isn't a workable solution for the vast majority of people? Comments like this give me a brief moment of wanting every engineer in tech (me included) to be laid off and replaced with excel people
        bena 4y ago
        Why isn't it? If your situation has reached the point where Excel is no longer a workable solution, you need a full application. I've never seen an Access application that didn't grow to a point where it wasn't a glitchy mess requiring a rewrite as a full stand-alone application. So you might as well skip that step and go straight to the stand-alone application. It's an unnecessary bridge.
        snapcaster 4y ago
        You understand that the people who are making Excel and Access apps aren't professional software developers right?
        4y ago
  - afavour 4y ago
    IMO Access is the real undervalued hero. Most spreadsheets using more than a few VLOOKUPs should really be a simple database instead.
- jdiez17 4y ago
  Excel is another amazing piece of software, that is almost universally looked down upon by programmers. Why make complex calculations in a GUI if you can just write a Python script with numpy and pandas!? And yet, so much of the world runs on excel spreadsheets being sent back and forth. Why? Because 1) it has a low skill floor and very high ceiling, 2) everyone uses the same tool (or at least it's backward and forward-compatible), and (critically) 3) it has a "programming model" that actually makes sense to the vast majority of people. Same with Arduino, by the way. I think Arduino is a masterpiece. It allows people that don't even consider themselves programmers to write code for embedded systems with ease (traditionally a very hard thing to do). They go to the Arduino website, download a program, open an example, click a button and it works. Also, the libraries are designed to be used by non-experts. That's so rare in the software world (and I don't know why*). * I have some guesses but they are not nice to the programmers that make and use trendy software libraries.
  - kitd 4y ago
    Excel is another amazing piece of software, that is almost universally looked down upon by programmers. I read somewhere that there are 10 x more Excel "programmers" in the world than programmers for all other languages put together.
    - 7thaccount 4y ago
      To give a little anecdote, my 600 person company probably has 200+ engineers (mostly electrical with some mechanical). I'd say that 1/5 has some programming skill in Python or C# and 1/10 probably is pretty decent and spends 5+ hours a week writing code. I'm fairly confident that all 200/200 are competent Excel users with most all spending 10+ hours a week doing spreadsheets mapping data together and analyzing it. Pandas is great, but if you don't need all the stats and the dataset fits in the spreadsheet, Excel beats it hands down in most uses.
    - AnIdiotOnTheNet 4y ago
      I would not be surprised. I have said before that Excel is the most widely used programming environment in history and will continue to be so for the foreseeable future, and it is all precisely because it provides users an on-ramp to programming in a domain where it is sorely needed.
- DeathArrow 4y ago
  You can program Excel using Visual Basic for Applications. At one of my former workplaces, a backend colleague of mine built a functional prototype of a new feature in Excel using VBA in far less time it took whole UI + frontend teams to build the same.
  - 7thaccount 4y ago
    It can be pretty nice to add a button to your spreadsheet that fires off a VBA macro that runs some code in the background. I just wish Microsoft made the whole experience a lot better as writing VBA is a bit confusing.
- throwawaaarrgh 4y ago
  Exactly like Excel! Both tools designed to let regular people achieve superhuman feats of computing without changing careers.
pif 4y ago
The problem arises when a clueless manager sees your tiny custom 50-line program and makes it responsible for anything more complex than a water dispenser, with the author and his boss praising the "simplicity" and "ease of development" of what is going to become the bane of the organization for the following decades. I do understand that most people don't want to be programmers, and that's fine. At the same time, professional software development needs professional software developers. Sure, most of us like to be able to fix a faucet, but would you trust a hobbyist plumber to design and maintain the toilets of the Yankee Stadium?
- runlaszlorun 4y ago
  Does this really happen often? I’m not saying it doesn’t, I’ve just heard the claim repeated often while never having seen it myself. Maybe because every project I’ve been on was far over-complicated rather under. A small, crappy prototype would also go far in sussing out requirements. But I’ve generally not seen that included enough in the development process for most big corporate internet projects.
mhd 4y ago
> Nerds just can't wrap their heads around this idea: no normal person wants to be a programmer. I'm coming to the exact opposite conclusion: A lot of people benefit from programmin a little. Which, at the time when VB came out, was a very popular opinion. Still enough computers around with BASIC as their interface. User-focused databases like dBase. Spreadsheets. VB was a bit in the uncanny valley between "professional" and user-focused programming, which is the main source for most negative opinions about it. I still think that more end-user programming is the right choice, but now that our software runs on someone else's computer or is completely walled off due to manufacturer choice or language cruft & learning curves, we've got our own little priesthood. I don't believe that "AI" will change this, but we would certainly deserve it.
- runlaszlorun 4y ago
  Agreed. I’m working on something to try to get back to that. But I’ve been bumbling through so many diff ideas that who knows if it’ll ever see a launch, let alone adoption. I think it’s fair to ask power users to come up a little to become a programmer, but then they get a much better system to their liking. I feel like there’s so much unnecessary complexity these days in different JS frameworks, CSS approaches, build and dependency systems, etc.
- mixdup 4y ago
  >> Nerds just can't wrap their heads around this idea: no normal person wants to be a programmer. >I'm coming to the exact opposite conclusion: A lot of people benefit from programmin a little. These are actually the same thing. There's a difference between having a little power to shave off the rough edges of your computing day as say an inventory specialist for a warehouse and being a kernel developer People benefit from a little bit of programming ability, but they don't want to be programmers Just like people benefit from being able to change their own oil but don't want to be mechanics
rejectfinite 4y ago
That's kind of what scripting languages are.
pif 4y ago
Visual Basic shares a fundamental truth with Internet Explorer: popular does not imply good.
- kitd 4y ago
  Well, except that VB didn't become popular simply by being shipped by default on millions of Windows desktops. It earned it's popularity by scratching a huge itch (at the time).
- bazoom42 4y ago
  VB was great though. Maybe the syntax was a bit clunky, but the overall developer experience was far ahead of other languages. Integrated debugger, edit-and-continue, code completion etc.
namaria 4y ago
I think you're conflating programming with coding. Us nerdy types like coding because it's so flexible and powerful. But setting an alarm is programming, as much as building a spreadsheet etc. Using a computer device for anything more then consuming media involves some degree of programming it. Everyone is a programmer now. But there is a big difference between being able to build and deliver software starting from nothing but a directory full of code and configuring point and click interfaces. Most people don't need to be coders. They just need to be able to program their computers a little bit.

zubairq 4y ago

Wish I could +100 this comment!

Pamar 4y ago

Sorta like Excel, then?

deafpolygon 4y ago
And Access! That's one amazing piece of software.
- fredsmith219 4y ago
  Access could easily become a victim of its own success if the dataset got too large. I made some money off of a couple projects where that happened. I had to convert them to sqlserver to both handle the data load and for true multiuser.
  - deafpolygon 4y ago
    That is true. People don't understand that there is an upper limit to Access before you run into issues - but it's fairly large.. what was it? 4GB? Edit: 2gb!
    - philbarr 4y ago
      Aaah - back in the day when we used to link 26 Access databases together, one for the first letter of a customer's surname... :)
      - whstl 4y ago
        You can add "built a custom database partitioning system" to your resumé. :)
    - whstl 4y ago
      Funny: back in the late 90s I ran a quite large (for the time) discussion board and everything was stored in an Access MDB file, similar to how people try to do today with SQLite. I didn't know better, that's how I though things worked. It worked quite well for several years, until of course I reached a limit (which was much smaller than 4GB), and I had to delete old posts.
    - lproven 4y ago
      It's worse than that. The thing that imposes these limitations is the somewhat primitive DB engine for Access, which is codenamed MS Jet: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Access_Database_Engine https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Access_Database_Engine But the big that MS & MS fans don't like to mention is that MS Exchange Server uses a version of the same storage engine. It's not mentioned even once in these Wikipedia articles, for instance, but if you look, you will find telltale giveaways such as Exchange store size limitations: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Exchange_Server https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Exchange_Server https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Microsoft_Exchange_Server https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Microsoft_Exchange_... However, if you dig a little, you'll find that the underlying storage engine is also codenamed "Jet": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extensible_Storage_Engine https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extensible_Storage_Engine Jet Red vs Jet Blue. Totally different, honest. These days, it's also used in trivial unimportant Windows subsystems such as -- er -- Active Directory, Windows Update, and the Windows Search indices. Yes, the fragile, essentially single-user, easily-corrupted Access DB engine is an integral part of Windows Server. Which is a bit odd considering MS also owns SQL Server (bought in from Sybase), and could in principle use that instead, which does not have these built-in limitations and is rather more robust. Access was in part built in response to Lotus Approach, which brought Claris Filemaker-like simplicity to Windows end-user databases. MS could not tolerate that, so built its own Approach-killer, which was vastly more complex. It acquired FoxPro, a dBase III/IV clone, for its very fast indexing functionality, which was bolted onto MS Cirrus to make Access, and the rest of FoxPro went largely unmaintained until it could be discontinued. Exchange Server of course replaced MS Mail, which was also bought in and was previously called Network Courier from Consumers Software. Other MS purchases include Powerpoint, Frontpage, Visual BASIC, and Visio. There is a general pattern evidence in 1990s MS software which isn't universal but widespread. If it's lean, mean, simple, fast, or elegant, it was bought in. If it's overcomplex, fragile, has bizarre limitations for non-obvious reasons, and needs careful maintenance, it was built in-house, probably in response to a successful competing product.
      - jjkaczor 4y ago
        Sigh - don't get me started on Jet engine DB corruption... You wink at it, over a network with more than a single user - and you have a chance of corruption...
  - kwhitefoot 4y ago
    When I worked with Access it was normal to separate the database into separate front end and back end. Then when the quantity of data or latency got too large you could easily convert that to SQL Server.
- bena 4y ago
  No. Fuck Access. Access is a useless piece of software that serves no purpose well. Either your data is small enough to be managed by Excel or your data is complex enough to be better served by a database and frontend. Dealing with the idiosyncrasies of Access is never worth it.
  - cutler 4y ago
    So how do you build a desktop database with a staff user interface for a small business running on a couple of Windows desktops?
    - anthk 4y ago
      Lazarus + SQLite. Problem solved.
      - snapcaster 4y ago
        Why won't you accept this isn't a workable solution for the vast majority of people? Comments like this give me a brief moment of wanting every engineer in tech (me included) to be laid off and replaced with excel people
        bena 4y ago
        Why isn't it? If your situation has reached the point where Excel is no longer a workable solution, you need a full application. I've never seen an Access application that didn't grow to a point where it wasn't a glitchy mess requiring a rewrite as a full stand-alone application. So you might as well skip that step and go straight to the stand-alone application. It's an unnecessary bridge.
        snapcaster 4y ago
        You understand that the people who are making Excel and Access apps aren't professional software developers right?
      - 4y ago
- afavour 4y ago
  IMO Access is the real undervalued hero. Most spreadsheets using more than a few VLOOKUPs should really be a simple database instead.
jdiez17 4y ago
Excel is another amazing piece of software, that is almost universally looked down upon by programmers. Why make complex calculations in a GUI if you can just write a Python script with numpy and pandas!? And yet, so much of the world runs on excel spreadsheets being sent back and forth. Why? Because 1) it has a low skill floor and very high ceiling, 2) everyone uses the same tool (or at least it's backward and forward-compatible), and (critically) 3) it has a "programming model" that actually makes sense to the vast majority of people. Same with Arduino, by the way. I think Arduino is a masterpiece. It allows people that don't even consider themselves programmers to write code for embedded systems with ease (traditionally a very hard thing to do). They go to the Arduino website, download a program, open an example, click a button and it works. Also, the libraries are designed to be used by non-experts. That's so rare in the software world (and I don't know why*). * I have some guesses but they are not nice to the programmers that make and use trendy software libraries.
- kitd 4y ago
  Excel is another amazing piece of software, that is almost universally looked down upon by programmers. I read somewhere that there are 10 x more Excel "programmers" in the world than programmers for all other languages put together.
  - 7thaccount 4y ago
    To give a little anecdote, my 600 person company probably has 200+ engineers (mostly electrical with some mechanical). I'd say that 1/5 has some programming skill in Python or C# and 1/10 probably is pretty decent and spends 5+ hours a week writing code. I'm fairly confident that all 200/200 are competent Excel users with most all spending 10+ hours a week doing spreadsheets mapping data together and analyzing it. Pandas is great, but if you don't need all the stats and the dataset fits in the spreadsheet, Excel beats it hands down in most uses.
  - AnIdiotOnTheNet 4y ago
    I would not be surprised. I have said before that Excel is the most widely used programming environment in history and will continue to be so for the foreseeable future, and it is all precisely because it provides users an on-ramp to programming in a domain where it is sorely needed.
DeathArrow 4y ago
You can program Excel using Visual Basic for Applications. At one of my former workplaces, a backend colleague of mine built a functional prototype of a new feature in Excel using VBA in far less time it took whole UI + frontend teams to build the same.
- 7thaccount 4y ago
  It can be pretty nice to add a button to your spreadsheet that fires off a VBA macro that runs some code in the background. I just wish Microsoft made the whole experience a lot better as writing VBA is a bit confusing.
throwawaaarrgh 4y ago
Exactly like Excel! Both tools designed to let regular people achieve superhuman feats of computing without changing careers.

pif 4y ago

The problem arises when a clueless manager sees your tiny custom 50-line program and makes it responsible for anything more complex than a water dispenser, with the author and his boss praising the "simplicity" and "ease of development" of what is going to become the bane of the organization for the following decades. I do understand that most people don't want to be programmers, and that's fine. At the same time, professional software development needs professional software developers. Sure, most of us like to be able to fix a faucet, but would you trust a hobbyist plumber to design and maintain the toilets of the Yankee Stadium?

runlaszlorun 4y ago
Does this really happen often? I’m not saying it doesn’t, I’ve just heard the claim repeated often while never having seen it myself. Maybe because every project I’ve been on was far over-complicated rather under. A small, crappy prototype would also go far in sussing out requirements. But I’ve generally not seen that included enough in the development process for most big corporate internet projects.

mhd 4y ago

> Nerds just can't wrap their heads around this idea: no normal person wants to be a programmer. I'm coming to the exact opposite conclusion: A lot of people benefit from programmin a little. Which, at the time when VB came out, was a very popular opinion. Still enough computers around with BASIC as their interface. User-focused databases like dBase. Spreadsheets. VB was a bit in the uncanny valley between "professional" and user-focused programming, which is the main source for most negative opinions about it. I still think that more end-user programming is the right choice, but now that our software runs on someone else's computer or is completely walled off due to manufacturer choice or language cruft & learning curves, we've got our own little priesthood. I don't believe that "AI" will change this, but we would certainly deserve it.

runlaszlorun 4y ago
Agreed. I’m working on something to try to get back to that. But I’ve been bumbling through so many diff ideas that who knows if it’ll ever see a launch, let alone adoption. I think it’s fair to ask power users to come up a little to become a programmer, but then they get a much better system to their liking. I feel like there’s so much unnecessary complexity these days in different JS frameworks, CSS approaches, build and dependency systems, etc.
mixdup 4y ago
>> Nerds just can't wrap their heads around this idea: no normal person wants to be a programmer. >I'm coming to the exact opposite conclusion: A lot of people benefit from programmin a little. These are actually the same thing. There's a difference between having a little power to shave off the rough edges of your computing day as say an inventory specialist for a warehouse and being a kernel developer People benefit from a little bit of programming ability, but they don't want to be programmers Just like people benefit from being able to change their own oil but don't want to be mechanics

rejectfinite 4y ago

That's kind of what scripting languages are.

pif 4y ago

Visual Basic shares a fundamental truth with Internet Explorer: popular does not imply good.

kitd 4y ago
Well, except that VB didn't become popular simply by being shipped by default on millions of Windows desktops. It earned it's popularity by scratching a huge itch (at the time).
bazoom42 4y ago
VB was great though. Maybe the syntax was a bit clunky, but the overall developer experience was far ahead of other languages. Integrated debugger, edit-and-continue, code completion etc.

namaria 4y ago

I think you're conflating programming with coding. Us nerdy types like coding because it's so flexible and powerful. But setting an alarm is programming, as much as building a spreadsheet etc. Using a computer device for anything more then consuming media involves some degree of programming it. Everyone is a programmer now. But there is a big difference between being able to build and deliver software starting from nothing but a directory full of code and configuring point and click interfaces. Most people don't need to be coders. They just need to be able to program their computers a little bit.