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Re:Ask HN: Why did Visual Basic die? by TrackerFF on Monday September 11, 2023 @03:26PM (#37472447)
Pre-face: I write a lot of VBA

VBA is kind of the result of people only - ONLY - wanting to use Excel for everything. I work with those people. They have mastered excel, but have little to zero interest in learning anything else, and would rather see the world be built around excel.

So you (like me) get tasked with building applications and forms in VBA.

I was STOKED when MS announced Python for excel, but alas, turned out to not be what I (and many other) wanted.

What's the medicine? Dunno, hire analysts that are more open to using other tools . Don't get me wrong, I love using excel for many tasks - but damnit, it's not the only tool.

Re:Ask HN: Why did Visual Basic die? by wavemode on Monday September 11, 2023 @04:20PM (#37473092)
The company I worked for in college was in the "VBA for everything" world. It was like the Renaissance when they started experimenting with Power Query for some use cases. (Which, honestly, was still a terrible language. But slightly more maintainable than VBA.)
Re:Ask HN: Why did Visual Basic die? by j45 on Monday September 11, 2023 @04:42PM (#37473427)
VB is not VBA, VBA was a relatively small subset.

I might be mistaken but wasn't VBA brought into Excel as a familiar element from the VB world?

It is true though that some of the more purer or more initial concepts of VB likely live on in the VBA subsets of Excel.

And Access.

Re:Ask HN: Why did Visual Basic die? by TrackerFF on Monday September 11, 2023 @05:26PM (#37473952)
VBA works fine if you want to create macros and automate various things for your spreadsheets, but the problem is that the end user want / demand full-blown applications layered over their spreadsheets. The last thing I worked on was a CRUD -interface where the user could read and write data from their spreadsheet, to a azure DB.

It wasn't difficult, but at its core, I had to do it because the end users didn't feel like using some other interface - they really didn't want to leave their excel spreadsheet.