4 ms·

People want more these days. With VB you could write a CRUD application that saved data to a database and ran some reports. But now people want the database to

People want more these days. With VB you could write a CRUD application that saved data to a database and ran some reports. But now people want the database to pull in multiple feeds from other businesses via API, people want it to be available on the web, it needs to have a self service component so the customer can also log in, at the back end the database is connected to several other systems with daily feeds coming in and out. Shit is just much more complicated these days.

polotics 3y ago
VB6 could do all these things and more, in the 90's I built just the right small parts in C++ to glue things together, and we could do multi-processing, resilient multi-server setups, and much much more. Serving HTTP for some always-limiting browser was an obvious easy sidenote, ie. what your mantra "available on the web" wraps in silver, but leveraging the full power of the desktop and OS was what power users actually wanted, and would still want now if the apps were there. I think some people at Microsoft realized VB had the potential to canibalize a lot of what they wanted as their proprietary backyard, and they killed the baby before it would grow into more of a mass movement. Now they succeeded, many that would have been educated into owning their computers now mindlessly click on "Yes" and are lost in the adds panopticon, but then MS had to non-compete some of the pie off to Google and co...
- codeulike 3y ago
  Right, you could do all that with VB but most people didn't. Exception handling was crap in VB (no call stack) so we wrote a Visual Studio Macro that would go and edit every single method to add "On Error Goto" with a block at the end of the method to automatically add the method name to a homemade exception object so that when there was an error we could actually tell where it was coming from. So you _can_ do that too in VB but it wasn't pretty.

polotics 3y ago

VB6 could do all these things and more, in the 90's I built just the right small parts in C++ to glue things together, and we could do multi-processing, resilient multi-server setups, and much much more. Serving HTTP for some always-limiting browser was an obvious easy sidenote, ie. what your mantra "available on the web" wraps in silver, but leveraging the full power of the desktop and OS was what power users actually wanted, and would still want now if the apps were there. I think some people at Microsoft realized VB had the potential to canibalize a lot of what they wanted as their proprietary backyard, and they killed the baby before it would grow into more of a mass movement. Now they succeeded, many that would have been educated into owning their computers now mindlessly click on "Yes" and are lost in the adds panopticon, but then MS had to non-compete some of the pie off to Google and co...

codeulike 3y ago
Right, you could do all that with VB but most people didn't. Exception handling was crap in VB (no call stack) so we wrote a Visual Studio Macro that would go and edit every single method to add "On Error Goto" with a block at the end of the method to automatically add the method name to a homemade exception object so that when there was an error we could actually tell where it was coming from. So you _can_ do that too in VB but it wasn't pretty.