5 ms·

The productivity wasn't really that good. Rose tinted glasses. All the VB apps I've seen (and still get paid to maintain/rewrite to this day in the finance worl

The productivity wasn't really that good. Rose tinted glasses. All the VB apps I've seen (and still get paid to maintain/rewrite to this day in the finance world) are an order of magnitude simpler than even a simple modern website. They often only have a few users, no devops automation, no deployment automation, terrible logging, terrible instrumentation, no tests, unacceptable access control, tons of failure edge cases, and poor performance. Most don't even have central databases, they just sit on Access and get copy pasted around like spreadsheets. While the UI part of Visual Basic was fast and easy, so is writing a React frontend that just stores data in browser LocalStorage, has no authentication, no logging, no monitoring, no tests, and deployment is emailing an updated js file to customers. The complexity of modern development enables 10-100x better productivity across all aspects of: safety, security, monitoring, error handling, maintenance, and new feature development. I can whip together a modern website that ticks all these boxes. To achieve the same in VB+Access would be monumental.

yc-kraln 3y ago
I was with you until "... so is writing a React frontend". No. No it's not. Making a functional UI in visual basic is childs play compared to the absolute cesspit of NIH and feature treadmill that frontend web development has become. You are gatekeeping with strawmen.
- JackMorgan 3y ago
  I was trying to compare like for like on features. Slapping together a few fields and a button in react and posting the results to an unauthorized endpoint doesn't feel any more difficult to me than the same in VB. However, it's certainly an order of magnitude more complex to use react with all the features expected of modern development with design systems, auth/z, logging, monitoring, etc.
  - taeric 3y ago
    I'm deploying react to a CDN for a living, and I would have no idea how to instruct someone to "slap together a few fields and a button" and put it somewhere meaningful. As a kid, I remember making full blown D&D character sheets based on an easy Access backend. You could even print them out. I want to, but I just can't back any claim that things have gotten easier for pretty much anything. With a ton of extra power on the compute side, parts of the machine have gotten attainable. But nothing about the process is easier along the way.
    - JohnBooty 3y ago
      I want to, but I just can't back any claim that things have gotten easier for pretty much anything. I think it's easier for a seasoned developer to spin up and deploy a "real" Djanjo/Rails/whatever app with decent table-stakes features like secure auth. But everything else is harder. I have zero idea how to tell a new developer to get started in the hobby/industry these days. The real problem IMO is the absolute churning shitstorm that is front-end development. I don't know how it got so bad, so quickly, and stayed that way for so long. We as an industry are not going to be happy until it takes at least 50 toolchain steps to produce a simple "hello world."
      - taeric 3y ago
        Getting a rails app up and running used to be somewhat easy. You did have to ssh into a machine, but that wasn't that complicated, all told. Comparable to standing up a BBS way back in the day. Restated, if you could have a machine that was dedicated to the serving of something, it wasn't that hard back in the day. To that end, I suspect telling people to just stand up a node server is where to start hobbyists off? Still very complicated with the division between front and backend that is difficult to see for new folks. And I fully agree on the ridiculous churn. Having zero stability in documentation and how to do things has been terrible for our industry. What we have gained in better ways seems to mostly be lost in all of the previous ways that used to work.
      - jaylittle 3y ago
        A-fucking-men!
    - hombre_fatal 3y ago
      On the other hand, I never understood how to build anything with Access despite having a book on it as a teen. Web tech, even in its early forms, was much more obvious to me and I could run code in the browser's web console. I could find JS snippets online, paste them into index.html, and open the page. I found VB/Access far more confusing than that. These days I help beginners pick up web dev and I think HNers overestimate (if not circlejerk over) how hard it is just because create-react-app does a lot of things. Client development always had a bunch of specific knowledge you had to learn, and the fat stack of supporting software you generally use (IDEs, Xcode, node_modules, SDK APIs, browser APIs, etc) was always a behemoth.
  - quickthrower2 3y ago
    I wonder how doable it would be to make a drag drop interface for building react complete with double click to add click handler and focus on that new code kinda stuff.
- chaostheory 3y ago
  A better comparison is with VB’a spiritual successor: Power Apps. Not sure, but I think VB is still responsible for most of MS’s security threats even now. It makes sense for MS to try to EOL
  - TrueGeek 3y ago
    I saw a talk on Power Apps at ATL DEV CON this weekend and was blown away. The only downside is it can only be used internally, with AD M365 logins. It won't work with B2Clogin, and it won't work without authentication. But, that's the only way I used VB6 - for internal software.
  - vb6sp6 3y ago
    [dead]
- Matumio 3y ago
  > You are gatekeeping with strawmen. Love the image. "Hey you! No visual aids go into this town! One more step, and my strawmen will React!" But the accountant with the abacus continued towards the east gate. He squeezed between two strawmen, who didn't React as much as the gatekeeper was implying.
- willlma 3y ago
  What does NIH stand for?
jenscow 3y ago
You should think about what the alternative was at the time: Mostly C/C++ VB6 you would have connected to the db by the end of the day. C/C++ you're still trying to handle WM_ERASEBKGND
- kibibu 3y ago
  Well you'd probably be using MFC which handled most of the windows messages. Or wasting time figuring out whether you should switch to ATL
- failuser 3y ago
  Borland was the alternative. You could throw together a C++ database application in a day. And if you used Delphi you even could not justify a coffee break by the long compile time.
j45 3y ago
Maybe not all apps need the complexity but portability.
anon____ 3y ago
Don't forget that most of those VB apps you've seen were hacked together by amateurs, engineers, business and finance people, not professional programmers. It was great for their productivity. They automated their work, and they couldn't have done it in C. BASIC = Beginners' All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code
oweiler 3y ago
Exactly! The little Visual Basic I saw was always and entangled, manually tested, spaghetti code mess. Devs were productive only at the start of the project and slowed down to a crawl as things got more complex.
- JohnBooty 3y ago
  Devs were productive only at the start of the project and slowed down to a crawl as things got more complex. ...and as your productivity declined, your manager thought you were a dolt or perhaps had some kind of drug problem that was interfering with your work. Because he saw how easy productivity was at the start ("look! you just draw a button with your mouse!") and couldn't understand why it quickly became a nightmare.
- Tao3300 3y ago
  My favorite VB6 moment was as an intern. I opened a project that lived on a shared drive that wasn't in source control. Visual Studio popped up a dialog warning that I didn't have the proper license on my PC for the parts of the app that interfaced with Excel. Then it cheerfully deleted the offending project files and sections of code and saved it. On the shared drive.
  - JackMorgan 3y ago
    Big oof right there. Thankfully, I've never had that happen on the job. The lack of meaningful version control in most VB projects is dangerous. It's like trying to operate a chainsaw without a handle. Whenever I get a new VB project to rewrite I always have to stop and remember "don't touch _anything!_". Then I sneak around like Indiana Jones in a lost temple filled with traps.
- JackMorgan 3y ago
  I make a good living turning VB+Access messes into something modern and stable. After a point it's such a huge mess that it's either rewrite or leave it untouched forever. Sometimes it's important enough to pay someone to untangle the whole snarl of cables and turn it into a modern project that can be handed off to a dev team. Thankfully it's usually pretty straightforward to get all the data out into a modern SQL database and whip up a bunch of CRUD forms in react. The hard part is what to do with all the bad data that is inevitably in the Access database. That often takes the most time, just getting them to clean up all the bad data.
rvba 3y ago
Most of those were built by non programmers for "free" (no extra pay).

yc-kraln 3y ago

I was with you until "... so is writing a React frontend". No. No it's not. Making a functional UI in visual basic is childs play compared to the absolute cesspit of NIH and feature treadmill that frontend web development has become. You are gatekeeping with strawmen.

JackMorgan 3y ago
I was trying to compare like for like on features. Slapping together a few fields and a button in react and posting the results to an unauthorized endpoint doesn't feel any more difficult to me than the same in VB. However, it's certainly an order of magnitude more complex to use react with all the features expected of modern development with design systems, auth/z, logging, monitoring, etc.
- taeric 3y ago
  I'm deploying react to a CDN for a living, and I would have no idea how to instruct someone to "slap together a few fields and a button" and put it somewhere meaningful. As a kid, I remember making full blown D&D character sheets based on an easy Access backend. You could even print them out. I want to, but I just can't back any claim that things have gotten easier for pretty much anything. With a ton of extra power on the compute side, parts of the machine have gotten attainable. But nothing about the process is easier along the way.
  - JohnBooty 3y ago
    I want to, but I just can't back any claim that things have gotten easier for pretty much anything. I think it's easier for a seasoned developer to spin up and deploy a "real" Djanjo/Rails/whatever app with decent table-stakes features like secure auth. But everything else is harder. I have zero idea how to tell a new developer to get started in the hobby/industry these days. The real problem IMO is the absolute churning shitstorm that is front-end development. I don't know how it got so bad, so quickly, and stayed that way for so long. We as an industry are not going to be happy until it takes at least 50 toolchain steps to produce a simple "hello world."
    - taeric 3y ago
      Getting a rails app up and running used to be somewhat easy. You did have to ssh into a machine, but that wasn't that complicated, all told. Comparable to standing up a BBS way back in the day. Restated, if you could have a machine that was dedicated to the serving of something, it wasn't that hard back in the day. To that end, I suspect telling people to just stand up a node server is where to start hobbyists off? Still very complicated with the division between front and backend that is difficult to see for new folks. And I fully agree on the ridiculous churn. Having zero stability in documentation and how to do things has been terrible for our industry. What we have gained in better ways seems to mostly be lost in all of the previous ways that used to work.
    - jaylittle 3y ago
      A-fucking-men!
  - hombre_fatal 3y ago
    On the other hand, I never understood how to build anything with Access despite having a book on it as a teen. Web tech, even in its early forms, was much more obvious to me and I could run code in the browser's web console. I could find JS snippets online, paste them into index.html, and open the page. I found VB/Access far more confusing than that. These days I help beginners pick up web dev and I think HNers overestimate (if not circlejerk over) how hard it is just because create-react-app does a lot of things. Client development always had a bunch of specific knowledge you had to learn, and the fat stack of supporting software you generally use (IDEs, Xcode, node_modules, SDK APIs, browser APIs, etc) was always a behemoth.
- quickthrower2 3y ago
  I wonder how doable it would be to make a drag drop interface for building react complete with double click to add click handler and focus on that new code kinda stuff.
chaostheory 3y ago
A better comparison is with VB’a spiritual successor: Power Apps. Not sure, but I think VB is still responsible for most of MS’s security threats even now. It makes sense for MS to try to EOL
- TrueGeek 3y ago
  I saw a talk on Power Apps at ATL DEV CON this weekend and was blown away. The only downside is it can only be used internally, with AD M365 logins. It won't work with B2Clogin, and it won't work without authentication. But, that's the only way I used VB6 - for internal software.
- vb6sp6 3y ago
  [dead]
Matumio 3y ago
> You are gatekeeping with strawmen. Love the image. "Hey you! No visual aids go into this town! One more step, and my strawmen will React!" But the accountant with the abacus continued towards the east gate. He squeezed between two strawmen, who didn't React as much as the gatekeeper was implying.
willlma 3y ago
What does NIH stand for?

jenscow 3y ago

You should think about what the alternative was at the time: Mostly C/C++ VB6 you would have connected to the db by the end of the day. C/C++ you're still trying to handle WM_ERASEBKGND

kibibu 3y ago
Well you'd probably be using MFC which handled most of the windows messages. Or wasting time figuring out whether you should switch to ATL
failuser 3y ago
Borland was the alternative. You could throw together a C++ database application in a day. And if you used Delphi you even could not justify a coffee break by the long compile time.

j45 3y ago

Maybe not all apps need the complexity but portability.

anon____ 3y ago

Don't forget that most of those VB apps you've seen were hacked together by amateurs, engineers, business and finance people, not professional programmers. It was great for their productivity. They automated their work, and they couldn't have done it in C. BASIC = Beginners' All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code

oweiler 3y ago

Exactly! The little Visual Basic I saw was always and entangled, manually tested, spaghetti code mess. Devs were productive only at the start of the project and slowed down to a crawl as things got more complex.

JohnBooty 3y ago
Devs were productive only at the start of the project and slowed down to a crawl as things got more complex. ...and as your productivity declined, your manager thought you were a dolt or perhaps had some kind of drug problem that was interfering with your work. Because he saw how easy productivity was at the start ("look! you just draw a button with your mouse!") and couldn't understand why it quickly became a nightmare.
Tao3300 3y ago
My favorite VB6 moment was as an intern. I opened a project that lived on a shared drive that wasn't in source control. Visual Studio popped up a dialog warning that I didn't have the proper license on my PC for the parts of the app that interfaced with Excel. Then it cheerfully deleted the offending project files and sections of code and saved it. On the shared drive.
- JackMorgan 3y ago
  Big oof right there. Thankfully, I've never had that happen on the job. The lack of meaningful version control in most VB projects is dangerous. It's like trying to operate a chainsaw without a handle. Whenever I get a new VB project to rewrite I always have to stop and remember "don't touch _anything!_". Then I sneak around like Indiana Jones in a lost temple filled with traps.
JackMorgan 3y ago
I make a good living turning VB+Access messes into something modern and stable. After a point it's such a huge mess that it's either rewrite or leave it untouched forever. Sometimes it's important enough to pay someone to untangle the whole snarl of cables and turn it into a modern project that can be handed off to a dev team. Thankfully it's usually pretty straightforward to get all the data out into a modern SQL database and whip up a bunch of CRUD forms in react. The hard part is what to do with all the bad data that is inevitably in the Access database. That often takes the most time, just getting them to clean up all the bad data.

rvba 3y ago

Most of those were built by non programmers for "free" (no extra pay).