6 ms·

> I wish someone would build a robust OS & GUI toolkit and ship it with developer tools... I think that's the web. The development that used to happen in VB6 &

by Nitramp 12y ago

> I wish someone would build a robust OS & GUI toolkit and ship it with developer tools... I think that's the web. The development that used to happen in VB6 & Delphi simply has migrated there, desktop apps from that segment are dead.

david927 12y ago
I think you're right, and it's a huge indictment. The web, as an application platform, is worse than VB ever was. Think about that for a moment: We've regressed from VB. The usual tradeoff is: easy to write, hard to extend and maintain. But the web is hard to write and hard to extend/maintain. We have some of the smartest people in the world in our industry, and evidently we're all idiots.
- Immortalin 12y ago
  I concur, the combination of css + js + html is an nightmare especially if you are are trying to design a simple database-backed website for your startup. Webforms might have been hard to maintain for some, but at least it worked well. There was no need to figure out all the background stuff if you are not a professional developer. If I need a fancier website based on mvc, I would have hired a fullstack django developer instead.
  - demallien 12y ago
    Yup, and if you are trying to do the full stack, you had better toss in some node.js or Ruby on Rails, plus SQL. Web development is really hard for non-developers to grok. I keep thinking back to an Access application that I threw together in a couple of days, back in the 90s for managing a team of about 40 technicians. It was being used for task tracking, and had some wiki-like features as well. When I started that project I knew nothing about Access or VB, and yet in two days I had a bunch of forms and tables that allowed managers to get a quick feel for what their staff were up to. The thing ran over the LAN, and could handle 10 simultaneous connections without any dramas. If I were to try the same thing in the web world, I might lose myself in getting just one table view working correctly for a week. Getting an http server configured and up and running, and talking to a db server would be at least two days. And there would be many potential roadblocks just waiting to trip me up along the way. These days, rather than dealing with that mess, many companies just go for an off-the-shelf hosted solution that sort of fits their needs, such as Basecamp, or Jira, or Igloo. The existence of these products is a sign that we've gone off in the wrong direction somewhere - the sorts of products they make are very similar to that online apps you could make with Access 20 years ago.
    - woah 12y ago
      You're idealizing Access for reasons unknown. If there actually was demand for such a tool, one would exist and would be making a ton of money. The fact that people use off the shelf SaaS is an indication of the fact that off the shelf SaaS is what they want. My suspicion is that Access is too hard for most business people, yet not powerful enough for actual developers to make something unique with. Salesforce has made a huge business out of business apps in the same category as whatever would have been cobbled together in the basement with Access by some 'IT guy' 20 years ago. The fact that this is the case is a reflection of the fact that people prefer the hosted, turnkey, polished experience that web-based SaaS provides over some half-baked internal app.
      - demallien 12y ago
        "You're idealizing Access for reasons unknown." Well, you might accept that I'm "idealizing" Access because, you know, I had a decent experience with it 20 years ago, as described in my first comment. No need to go searching for mysterious ulterior motives when they're explained in the post! For what it's worth, I do remember significant flaws in Access. For one thing, it was an absolute pain when we wanted to modify the database - we had to get everyone to log off, and then upgrade all of the clients at once. This is one of those problems that the web solves elegantly. Also, Access had major issues with concurrent users. Performance fell off a cliff, and from memory, certain operations were unsafe (I think you could set up a SQLServer which would address the concurrency problems, but we never bothered). But these days we have better options available to us - app stores fix the updating problem, without introducing the css + html + javascript mess. We have decent, free web servers, and web application frameworks such as Django and Rails that make writing the server side code that drives the RESTful APIs used by the client relatively easy. But what we don't have is: a) an easy way to create a server (this needs to be as easy as sharing an Excel spreadsheet) b) a coherent development environment from client to server code. Something that allowed you to write apps purely in Javascript (no css or html) with a GUI editor, and which also let you write the server code in node.js would be a close match to what I'm thinking of. Bonus points if most of the node.js code is derived from the client-side code, so that the novice programmer doesn't need to be aware that a server even exists, it just works. The problem is, that's the kind of application that's really hard to write. It's big, an IDE in fact, and really Microsoft is the only game in town for making that sort of stuff. But they won't write Android / iOS / Mac clients, so it doesn't happen.
- quonn 12y ago
  A common complaint, but I don't think it's true: Web applications are _much_ more flexible as far as screen size and device types are concerned and they are multi-user, networked by default. If you would want to achieve both of these with a VB-like approach, it would be just as complex. I think the most important issues with the web that are not already being addressed (and winning) are a statically typed Javascript replacement and a way to locally isolate the effect of CSS in large applications with many modules (web components don't solve this correctly).
  - WoodenChair 12y ago
    You're focusing on what's good about the Web and not addressing what's good about VB (that's what this thread is about): a stable API platform, and easy WYSIWIG GUI design. The Web (or at least the tools for it) largely lacks those two things.
- woah 12y ago
  Weird to see people complaining about the web all the time. The fact that it can do things ranging from typesetting to form applications, to marketing sites, to full blown games is pretty amazing. If you feel that you would like to make a SaaS providing a SQL backed drag and drop form editor, you can do this on the web. The fact that nothing like VB exists any more is a reflection of the fact that the market simply does not find these things useful.
- dragonwriter 12y ago
  > But the web is hard to write and hard to extend/maintain. The web is distributed and distributed is hard. The problem is that it is also what people want. We haven't regressed from VB6 -- we've advanced, but the demands of the market may have gotten more complicated faster than the popular tools have advanced in their ability to simplify them.
  - spion 12y ago
    But the web isn't hard because its distributed. Its mostly because HTML and CSS were not designed for making applications.
    - gaius 12y ago
      Exactly. If Microsoft had written Outlook in VBA as a plugin for Word, they'd have been laughed out of the room. But that's exactly what Google did with Gmail...
- monstermonster 12y ago
  This, a million times. I'm a bit further down the abstraction chain but I am thoroughly glad I sit there all day writing C/C++ for Windows native (win32) GUI applications. I know once I've tested it on one machine it's going to work fine on all the other ones. It's the most stable API and platform I've ever seen. Code we wrote for Windows NT4 works fine on Windows 8.1 and behaves exactly the same. Compare that to our poor web guy who spends at least 50% of his time trying to get everything working on a selection of browsers going from IE6 to the latest Chrome while necking red bull, using the F word a lot, smoking and going bright purple.
  - WoodenChair 12y ago
    I completely agree with you guys. The tone deafness in this thread with regards to why VB6 appealed to beginners is striking. No, beginners don't want to layout things in CSS, a declarative XML language, or any other 'text' way. They want to drag and drop components with the sort of ease of use that Visual Studio or Interface Builder offer. And they want a language coupled with that which features the simplicity of Python. I too did some of my first serious programming in a VB like language in the 90s (RealBasic for Mac). I now develop beginner training materials in web development as a side gig and while we have fun - it's definitely not as satisfying as laying out a form in VB and having a real GUI in a matter of minutes that "Just Works."
    - eldavido 12y ago
      Which makes you wonder, could you bolt a language like Python onto an interface builder a la Xcode IB, Visual Studio Forms designer, etc? I agree with you, I think the bigger picture here is how well the IDE, GUI, and code hang together as a complete unit; focusing on any in isolation (e.g. "VB sucks, use Python") misses the point.
  - eldavido 12y ago
    I used to work at Microsoft (SQL Server). It goes without saying, but getting here is an intentional, conscious thing Microsoft spends billions of dollars to achieve. Working in SF in earlier-stage companies, I've never seen anything even close to the rigor with which Microsoft approached testing. Definitely consider working there if you want to learn from some of the best QA/QE/verification engineers in the industry.
SandB0x 12y ago
The web has its own equivalent of the gtk bindings issue. For a new programmer, gluing together a load of different languages and libraries is a nightmare. For experienced programmers too. http://tilomitra.com/the-crazy-world-of-code/ http://tilomitra.com/the-crazy-world-of-code/
ZanyProgrammer 12y ago
Modern day WinForms in .Net work just as well for coding up simple GUIs.
- bartwe 12y ago
  Winforms is fine, not as powerful as what came before it but otherwise good. The problem with winforms is WPF supposedly deprecating it.
  - ZanyProgrammer 12y ago
    WPF has a much steeper learning curve though. For non customer facing desktop programs, WinForms is fine.
    - bartwe 12y ago
      I don't think WPF has been successful in replacing winforms, more that it was a hard sell to management to use winforms after WPF was announced.
  - deleted 12y ago
    [deleted]
dragonwriter 12y ago
> I think that's the web. The development that used to happen in VB6 & Delphi simply has migrated there, desktop apps from that segment are dead. A lot of the internal desktop LOB application development that used to happen in VB or Delphi still is done on the desktop, but happens in Excel with VBScript. That trend was very much visible when VB (pre-VB.NET) was still current.

by Nitramp 12y ago

david927 12y ago

I think you're right, and it's a huge indictment. The web, as an application platform, is worse than VB ever was. Think about that for a moment: We've regressed from VB. The usual tradeoff is: easy to write, hard to extend and maintain. But the web is hard to write and hard to extend/maintain. We have some of the smartest people in the world in our industry, and evidently we're all idiots.

Immortalin 12y ago
I concur, the combination of css + js + html is an nightmare especially if you are are trying to design a simple database-backed website for your startup. Webforms might have been hard to maintain for some, but at least it worked well. There was no need to figure out all the background stuff if you are not a professional developer. If I need a fancier website based on mvc, I would have hired a fullstack django developer instead.
- demallien 12y ago
  Yup, and if you are trying to do the full stack, you had better toss in some node.js or Ruby on Rails, plus SQL. Web development is really hard for non-developers to grok. I keep thinking back to an Access application that I threw together in a couple of days, back in the 90s for managing a team of about 40 technicians. It was being used for task tracking, and had some wiki-like features as well. When I started that project I knew nothing about Access or VB, and yet in two days I had a bunch of forms and tables that allowed managers to get a quick feel for what their staff were up to. The thing ran over the LAN, and could handle 10 simultaneous connections without any dramas. If I were to try the same thing in the web world, I might lose myself in getting just one table view working correctly for a week. Getting an http server configured and up and running, and talking to a db server would be at least two days. And there would be many potential roadblocks just waiting to trip me up along the way. These days, rather than dealing with that mess, many companies just go for an off-the-shelf hosted solution that sort of fits their needs, such as Basecamp, or Jira, or Igloo. The existence of these products is a sign that we've gone off in the wrong direction somewhere - the sorts of products they make are very similar to that online apps you could make with Access 20 years ago.
  - woah 12y ago
    You're idealizing Access for reasons unknown. If there actually was demand for such a tool, one would exist and would be making a ton of money. The fact that people use off the shelf SaaS is an indication of the fact that off the shelf SaaS is what they want. My suspicion is that Access is too hard for most business people, yet not powerful enough for actual developers to make something unique with. Salesforce has made a huge business out of business apps in the same category as whatever would have been cobbled together in the basement with Access by some 'IT guy' 20 years ago. The fact that this is the case is a reflection of the fact that people prefer the hosted, turnkey, polished experience that web-based SaaS provides over some half-baked internal app.
    - demallien 12y ago
      "You're idealizing Access for reasons unknown." Well, you might accept that I'm "idealizing" Access because, you know, I had a decent experience with it 20 years ago, as described in my first comment. No need to go searching for mysterious ulterior motives when they're explained in the post! For what it's worth, I do remember significant flaws in Access. For one thing, it was an absolute pain when we wanted to modify the database - we had to get everyone to log off, and then upgrade all of the clients at once. This is one of those problems that the web solves elegantly. Also, Access had major issues with concurrent users. Performance fell off a cliff, and from memory, certain operations were unsafe (I think you could set up a SQLServer which would address the concurrency problems, but we never bothered). But these days we have better options available to us - app stores fix the updating problem, without introducing the css + html + javascript mess. We have decent, free web servers, and web application frameworks such as Django and Rails that make writing the server side code that drives the RESTful APIs used by the client relatively easy. But what we don't have is: a) an easy way to create a server (this needs to be as easy as sharing an Excel spreadsheet) b) a coherent development environment from client to server code. Something that allowed you to write apps purely in Javascript (no css or html) with a GUI editor, and which also let you write the server code in node.js would be a close match to what I'm thinking of. Bonus points if most of the node.js code is derived from the client-side code, so that the novice programmer doesn't need to be aware that a server even exists, it just works. The problem is, that's the kind of application that's really hard to write. It's big, an IDE in fact, and really Microsoft is the only game in town for making that sort of stuff. But they won't write Android / iOS / Mac clients, so it doesn't happen.
quonn 12y ago
A common complaint, but I don't think it's true: Web applications are _much_ more flexible as far as screen size and device types are concerned and they are multi-user, networked by default. If you would want to achieve both of these with a VB-like approach, it would be just as complex. I think the most important issues with the web that are not already being addressed (and winning) are a statically typed Javascript replacement and a way to locally isolate the effect of CSS in large applications with many modules (web components don't solve this correctly).
- WoodenChair 12y ago
  You're focusing on what's good about the Web and not addressing what's good about VB (that's what this thread is about): a stable API platform, and easy WYSIWIG GUI design. The Web (or at least the tools for it) largely lacks those two things.
woah 12y ago
Weird to see people complaining about the web all the time. The fact that it can do things ranging from typesetting to form applications, to marketing sites, to full blown games is pretty amazing. If you feel that you would like to make a SaaS providing a SQL backed drag and drop form editor, you can do this on the web. The fact that nothing like VB exists any more is a reflection of the fact that the market simply does not find these things useful.
dragonwriter 12y ago
> But the web is hard to write and hard to extend/maintain. The web is distributed and distributed is hard. The problem is that it is also what people want. We haven't regressed from VB6 -- we've advanced, but the demands of the market may have gotten more complicated faster than the popular tools have advanced in their ability to simplify them.
- spion 12y ago
  But the web isn't hard because its distributed. Its mostly because HTML and CSS were not designed for making applications.
  - gaius 12y ago
    Exactly. If Microsoft had written Outlook in VBA as a plugin for Word, they'd have been laughed out of the room. But that's exactly what Google did with Gmail...
monstermonster 12y ago
This, a million times. I'm a bit further down the abstraction chain but I am thoroughly glad I sit there all day writing C/C++ for Windows native (win32) GUI applications. I know once I've tested it on one machine it's going to work fine on all the other ones. It's the most stable API and platform I've ever seen. Code we wrote for Windows NT4 works fine on Windows 8.1 and behaves exactly the same. Compare that to our poor web guy who spends at least 50% of his time trying to get everything working on a selection of browsers going from IE6 to the latest Chrome while necking red bull, using the F word a lot, smoking and going bright purple.
- WoodenChair 12y ago
  I completely agree with you guys. The tone deafness in this thread with regards to why VB6 appealed to beginners is striking. No, beginners don't want to layout things in CSS, a declarative XML language, or any other 'text' way. They want to drag and drop components with the sort of ease of use that Visual Studio or Interface Builder offer. And they want a language coupled with that which features the simplicity of Python. I too did some of my first serious programming in a VB like language in the 90s (RealBasic for Mac). I now develop beginner training materials in web development as a side gig and while we have fun - it's definitely not as satisfying as laying out a form in VB and having a real GUI in a matter of minutes that "Just Works."
  - eldavido 12y ago
    Which makes you wonder, could you bolt a language like Python onto an interface builder a la Xcode IB, Visual Studio Forms designer, etc? I agree with you, I think the bigger picture here is how well the IDE, GUI, and code hang together as a complete unit; focusing on any in isolation (e.g. "VB sucks, use Python") misses the point.
- eldavido 12y ago
  I used to work at Microsoft (SQL Server). It goes without saying, but getting here is an intentional, conscious thing Microsoft spends billions of dollars to achieve. Working in SF in earlier-stage companies, I've never seen anything even close to the rigor with which Microsoft approached testing. Definitely consider working there if you want to learn from some of the best QA/QE/verification engineers in the industry.

SandB0x 12y ago

The web has its own equivalent of the gtk bindings issue. For a new programmer, gluing together a load of different languages and libraries is a nightmare. For experienced programmers too. http://tilomitra.com/the-crazy-world-of-code/ http://tilomitra.com/the-crazy-world-of-code/

ZanyProgrammer 12y ago

Modern day WinForms in .Net work just as well for coding up simple GUIs.

bartwe 12y ago
Winforms is fine, not as powerful as what came before it but otherwise good. The problem with winforms is WPF supposedly deprecating it.
- ZanyProgrammer 12y ago
  WPF has a much steeper learning curve though. For non customer facing desktop programs, WinForms is fine.
  - bartwe 12y ago
    I don't think WPF has been successful in replacing winforms, more that it was a hard sell to management to use winforms after WPF was announced.
- deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]

dragonwriter 12y ago

> I think that's the web. The development that used to happen in VB6 & Delphi simply has migrated there, desktop apps from that segment are dead. A lot of the internal desktop LOB application development that used to happen in VB or Delphi still is done on the desktop, but happens in Excel with VBScript. That trend was very much visible when VB (pre-VB.NET) was still current.