Re:The Rise and Fall of Visual Basic
by smhenderson on Sunday June 23, 2019 @09:55AM
(#20255497)
The first money I made using a computer was writing simple business automation apps in VB, first 5 and for a short while 6. I also dabbled in Access Basic and then VBA when all the office apps standardized on it instead of each having their own flavor.
VB was great like you said until you needed to do something difficult. I remember Bruce McKinny’s Hardcore Visual Basic book being my best friend for a little while. It thought me I could do the hard stuff in C, make a DLL and drop that into my VB project.
Bruce had a saying, VB makes 95% of the job easy and the other 5% impossible.
Re:The Rise and Fall of Visual Basic
by jeffFrom18F on Monday June 24, 2019 @02:31AM
(#20260997)
I was going to make a reference to "Hardcore Visual Basic" but you beat me to it. Fantastic book, it's hard to find a tech book that is that useful and fun at the same time.
My first job started out with mostly Visual Basic 6. One of the modules written in VC++ by a bunch of guys who were looking to get that on their resume (they had since departed). It probably should have just been in VB as well and was always a nightmare to debug and enhance.
Once .net was prominent we mostly moved to C#. There didn't seem to be much of a reason to go with VB.Net, C# seemed more "legitimate" and without the hassles of Visual C++/MFC.
Decades later and I still find myself writing an Excel macro in VBA now and then but I've largely moved on.
Matt Curland's "Advanced Visual Basic 6: Power Techniques for Everyday Programs: Hardcore Programming Techniques" was a cracker of a book as well back in the day:
Re:The Rise and Fall of Visual Basic
by qwerty456127 on Sunday June 23, 2019 @11:41PM
(#20260336)
I bloody wish a VB6/Delphi/WinForms-like IDE was available for Python. Coding anything relevant in VB is pain, as is creating GUIs in Python.
Threaded GUIs in python is a... fun experience.
There is Boa Constructor (the name seems to be a play on C++ Builder, the C++ counterpart of Delphi): http://boa-constructor.sourceforge.net/
Though it has been a while since its last update.
Sure? I thought it was after "constrictor" [1]
Re:The Rise and Fall of Visual Basic
by qwerty456127 on Thursday June 27, 2019 @04:33PM
(#20298424)
It's more than a decade old. I doubt it's going to work with modern versions of Python and libraries. It's very sad it has been abandoned. The fact it has been probably means it was very difficult to maintain.
Re:The Rise and Fall of Visual Basic
by karstenheld3 on Tuesday June 25, 2019 @05:46AM
(#20272523)
I always liked the Collection object in VB but for large number of items access by index was very slow. And Scripting.Dictionary couldn't access by index. So I wrote "DictCollection", a mix of Collection and Dictionary that can emulate both. With sorting, filtering, subcollection nesting, .Copy(), .Clone(), .ToArray(), .ToTable() and lots of String/Array manipulation functions. It's a universal data structure just like the JavaScript object or LUA table. It can act as a list/array, a key-value-store or an object tree. Take a look here https://github.com/karstenheld3/WhizzyVBA
Re:The Rise and Fall of Visual Basic
by nullwasamistake on Sunday June 23, 2019 @10:15PM
(#20260011)
Java and .NET still support "edit and continue" debugging. Once your program messes up a crash is usually better.
Visual Studio doesn't support edit and continue for 64 bit applications. I guess you can do your debugging in 32 bit but if that means compiling 32 bit versions of all your native libraries too, it's a giant pain.
Re:The Rise and Fall of Visual Basic
by nullwasamistake on Monday June 24, 2019 @12:03PM
(#20264923)
I didn't know that, but I assume you're referring to native instead of .NET based? Java definitely supports editing while debugging so fairly sure MS would in C# and VB.net
Re:The Rise and Fall of Visual Basic
by rubber_duck on Sunday June 23, 2019 @06:37PM
(#20259157)
Maybe I'm missing something since I haven't touched any of this in years but isn't .net winforms builder the same experience but with a saner language ?
Agree. To me the VB.net improvement all made sense. But it is true that VB.net introduced a few complexities as well. Like strings can be null, so checking for emptyness is a bit more complicated. But also simplified other things, like I believe VB6 was using only reference counting for its garbage collection so it was important not to create circular references.
In Common Lisp you can do the edit-and-continue thing, and the language can be very fast if you want it to be.
Re:The Rise and Fall of Visual Basic
by gautam1168 on Monday June 24, 2019 @01:18AM
(#20260733)
use electronjs
Re:The Rise and Fall of Visual Basic
by brighter2morrow on Monday June 24, 2019 @06:46AM
(#20262109)
Is there a simple way to make an electronjs app with a python backend? Also does electronjs have a drag-and-drop GUI ide?
I still sometimes program in Classic VB, (aka VB6). Each year it is more difficult to install the IDE, but the runtime is still installed by default.
It is incredible easy to build a nice one screen application with not very a very complicated background logic. Normal people like a nice graphical interface with a few buttons, and with Classic VB you can create them very easily and iterate and customize the form.
My last big problem was that it doesn't have a build in sort function, so you can use a n^2 sort or write a good sorting function by hand :( . When the logic start to be not so easy, there begin to apear problems.
--
About the article: I agree with most of it.
> Also on the big side: There was no more edit-and-continue feature.
I still miss that when I program in other languages. It kills so many (all!) optimizations possibilities, but it's extremely handy.
> VB.Fred and the .NET Solution
I call it VB# or VB#.Net instead of VB.Fred.