5 ms·
I think for a lot of purposes, the internet kind of took over. VB was great if you needed to do something limited to a single machine. These days, we want dat
by dghlsakjg 3y ago
I think for a lot of purposes, the internet kind of took over.
VB was great if you needed to do something limited to a single machine.
These days, we want data to be available across machines which requires using a network, and the default network is the internet.
If I'm going to be using the internet anyway, I can knock up something in HTML + JS + firebase/whatever data store, and have an application that works on any platform, and is accessible from anywhere in the world. You might need slightly more technical knowledge, but not so much that you can't have a simple CRUD app running in a day or so of work.
- _f1dq 3y agoI can write HTML/CSS/JS and a few back-end languages like PHP in my sleep but there's no way I could hand-code a web app as fast as I could a desktop app in 1997 using VB. I would LOVE it if I could, though.
- bsimpson 3y agoI've never written VB, but I can bang out a React UI in jsxstyle like nobody's business. You've piqued my curiosity.
- pdntspa 3y agoCheck out Lazarus and FreePascal
- jlarocco 3y agoDevelopment in VB6 was basically dragging and dropping controls onto a window or dialog box, setting properties on them, and then filling in snippets of code to tie things together. And "control" here means anything from simple labels and buttons up to database connections and embedded COM objects. Literally anybody could bang out a simple Windows .exe like nobody's business. It would have been really cool if Microsoft included it in the OS like they used to do with QBasic.
- christophilus 3y agoSame. I’m very good at cranking out Tailwind + React UIs, but nothing touches the productivity I had with VB6 or even early C# and Winforms.
- meredydd 3y agoHave you tried https://anvil.works https://anvil.works? (I'm a founder!) It's quite explicitly VB-esque (only using Python), and having a single paradigm rather than stitching together several different programs speeds things up even for those who can write HTML/JS/CSS in their sleep. (And of course, you can drop out to JS/CSS/HTML if you want.) Overall I think the development speed is comparable to VB6.
- SuperHeavy256 3y agoI tried it out and followed the entire tutorial, but the compulsory 'anvil' branding on every free published app kinda killed it for me. VB never had that.
- basiskarten 3y agoBut VB also didn't host web apps for you including databases, user accounts, email etc. I think self hosting is an option with Anvil by now, in which case you may be able to remove the branding.
- anigbrowl 3y agoIt looks significantly better since the last time I checked it - well done!
- jimnotgym 3y agoReminds me... maybe I can finally build that app I couldn't be bothered to build before...
- basiskarten 3y agoI started with Delphi 5 and completely share the sentiment of OP, development experience (mainly when building GUIs) was way better back then. For anyone who feels similarly I can only recommend you to look into Anvil. It is a fantastic tool, under active development and with a helpful and supporting community. It allowed me to build web apps by myself that I previously thought about hiring someone for. Very enjoyable experience and of course the fact that I am building web apps instead of desktop apps is a big plus in many scenarios today. Great to see you here, Merdedydd! I was thinking about sending this thread to you. I discovered Anvil in a similar thread years ago and am very happy I did.
- jenscow 3y agoBe careful what you wish for: https://www.wix.com/ https://www.wix.com/
- amtamt 3y ago> VB was great if you needed to do something limited to a single machine. VB6 used to work with oracle across network.
- stuff4ben 3y agoYes, the common 3 tier app at the time with ODBC to connect to your databases.
- meepmorp 3y agoMore common, in my experience, was the 2 tier app where a (very) fat client directly talked to the db, and all the businesses and data access logic was intermixed with UI event handlers and some stored procedures.
- j-a-a-p 3y agoSame here, we did a VB6 project that allowed the customer to chat with their remote mortgage advisor using a webcam, around '98. The client was supposed to go to a local branch of the bank and then connect to the banks HQ. I have also wondered why the software industry with the arrival of Internet went away from all these excellent tools. Not just VB6, but remember all the 4GL and model driven development tools. All gone and never really replaced.
- SoftTalker 3y agoIt was all about the difficulty of actually installing software on all those desktops. The web eliminated all of that. And it was so easy for ODBC and other configs to get trampled on by users and installers running amok over existing settings. Everyone was root on their PC in those days. The opportunity for users to screw things up accidentally was everywhere.
- walnutclosefarm 3y agoWell, that, and all those wonderful apps were inherently client-server architectures, with the business logic on the client. Nobody ever built a properly factored, with stateless layering, and high-end scalability on such an architecture. Just trying to keep 1000 clients in sync, so your business logic remained consistent could drive you to distraction; in a truly distributed product with tens or hundreds of thousands of clients, it was impossible.
- stuff4ben 3y agoYep, this is the right answer. I was there, 23 years ago programming VB6, making apps that were wrapped up in InstallShield, burnt to a CD, and then mailed to our customers. We did do some web things with Apache and some C++ apps interfaced via CGI. But it seemed that overnight Java and Servlets came about and made CGI-bin obsolete and slow as molasses. Add in JSPs and Struts and you had fully functional web apps that were fast and scalable.
- bmj 3y agoDon't forget that VB.NET was a thing. I worked on a web-based client management system that used VB.NET on the back-end.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- aldousd666 3y agoIt still is a thing. VB.net is a CLR language just like C#. You can use a tool to translate from one to the other and back.
- aldousd666 3y agoYup, that was also my take. I used to write 'on box' and you communicated between components using Com+, and when you switched to http, there was no reason to stick with just VB6.
- rathboma 3y agoDoes no-one remember VBScript and Active Server Pages (ASP). It was Visual basic as a server-side language, positioned to challenge PHP. VB made it to the web :-)
- SoftTalker 3y agoOh yes. And VBscript in the browser as well (as long as it was IE). One of their attempts at browser "lock-in"
- antod 3y agoIf you installed ActivePerl or ActivePython (remember those?), IE would also let you use them in the browser too with Active Scripting. It was an ActiveX thing, so only for IE.
- antod 3y agoI doubt MS was even aware of PHP 1.x when they released ASP back in 1996. Hardly anyone else was aware of PHP before 3.x either. By the time I found it, PHP 3.x/4.x was such an improvement over classic ASP / VBScript, that I think MS would've done a better job if it was positioned to challenge PHP :)
- wruza 3y agoYou might need slightly more technical knowledge, but not so much that you can't have a simple CRUD app running in a day or so of work. Well that’s quite a professional bubble you live in. Web dev is truly a frog in a boiling water. If my VB/Delphi/Access/PIC buddy who made various apps and hardware back in the day asked me for a platform and I advised him to use what HN praises as “simple”, then pretty sure he’ll never contact me with it again. I mean, yeah, CRUD is not hard to do by tutorial. But he will laugh at my CRUD explanation, because he never ever thought about implementing input <> data channels. It’s akin to positioning heads above a cylinder to fetch a database record.
- dghlsakjg 3y agoI said the app was simple, not the stack. Along with the rise of complexity in tooling, the data has risen in complexity and quantity, as well as the importance of getting it right. Back then, a dentist, lets say, could get by with a cobbled together VB program for patient scheduling and CRM. Now patients and doctors expect a system that manages digital records in a HIPAA compliant way, can text message reminders to the patients, allows self service on the web, and automatically submits billing details to insurance. Plus, it should be pretty, with all sorts of cute animations!
- wruza 3y agoI’d like to learn how the rising complexity of tooling allows for text messaging, compliance, self-service or mailing(?). Right now this idea doesn’t sound particularly reasonable to me.
- dghlsakjg 3y agoYou can run a web server for self service, use a job queue on that same server to schedule actions sent to api providers for sms (Twilio) and letter mail (postgrid), integrate with insurers that provide an api if you don’t want to send papermail. All on a single machine, or virtual machine running JS, and serving JS and HTML. Compliance is a matter of ensuring that you are following correct practices, and possible audits. In exchange you get a program that can run on any of billions of devices in seconds without having to worry about local deployment. If all you want is something like VB, you can opt for some of the low-code/no-code options mentioned elsewhere that are built on top of web technology. I’m not saying that for what VB was used for, it isn’t a better solution. I’m saying that we ask our computers to do a lot more than we did 25 years ago, and tools like VB can’t do as much as the easier to write languages that have emerged in that time.
- shadowgovt 3y agoThere was a parallel universe where VB was going to be a web scripting language. That idea got hamstrung by two things: 1) It turns out cross-platform web compatibility was way more important than anything else, so nobody wanted to write web pages using vbscript if that meant Netscape Navigator / Firefox couldn't read them. MS wasn't willing to either let the language go into the public or subsidize developing the engine for other browsers, so the web dev space just kinda... Didn't care 2) It may have hung on as a scripting language for IE-only stacks, but the Microsoft antitrust lawsuit (and subsequent appearance of Chrome on the scene as a better enterprise browser, with its stability improvements and process sandboxing) ended that era.
- failuser 3y agoHTML, CSS and JS are not the best pieces of technology, otherwise there would not have been a whole industry of tools that allowed you not to touch them with a ten-foot pole. But we are stuck with them at least for a while.
- gadders 3y agoNone of the VBA apps I ever saw needed the internet. They were mostly internal apps that connected to a corporate database over the internal LAN for stuff like "keeping a register of who has checked out which van".