Comment by HCIdivision17 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by HCIdivision17 | Hacker News Reader

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I work in industrial automation, and you really don't want to know what an awesome impact VB6 had on manufacturing. As `sjm-lbm noted below [0], it fills that essential niche between stuff that's useful and stuff that's too important to kludge. And I think as programmers/engineers, we should all kinda grok that you can get away with a lot of kludge before the world ends.

My favorite take on this idea is a guy in a forum replying about how vilified VBA is. I can't find the note for the life of me, but basically he said "You may work out and find the perfect tool for the job, but sometimes you just need a turbo-powered pneumatic nail gun to bang out something that mostly works." Skilled carpentry is a thing of beauty, but sometimes you just want the goddam floorboard held in place so the painter can get to work.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11756195

PS: I've perpetrated my own intellectual violence upon the world via VB, and generally it's what got me programming in my job. I learned C in high school, did some C++ in college, but I really got started in VB6. Eventually I escaped to Python, but man, I still appreciate how ubiquitous VB is. In Windows land, you can always fail back to some absurd version of VB (either in some VBA in a remnant Office installation, or VBscript, or the like - they're all a bit different, but not enough to stop an enterprising hacker).

Microsoft actually did release a good tool for the non-professional segment for writing database apps called lightswitch, that was better, higher level than VB. But they stopped selling it after some time. Shame.

It's actually a general problem in the market for software development tools, somehow the market for them isn't functioning well, and some great tools that we know how to build aren't produced.

Lightswitch was an amazing example of poor positioning. If you looked at the marketing material for it, it was positioned as a tool to "build three tier web applications" followed by a bunch of words that I didn't really understand.

It's really sad, because the tech there was really impressive.

Lightswitch was also tightly coupled with Silverlight when first released. The death of Silverlight doomed it. I believe that there is an HTML output version, but I doubt there is much interest.

Was that the tool that always tried to install with VS?

For a very brief period of time it was actually a standalone product that was being developed when I was at MSFT (2010ish), but eventually they just rolled it into VS.

I taught myself to program at a professional level working on VB.NET. nothing i'd ever tried "clicked" with me until i could see all the pieces coming together. The syntax reminded me of old VBA macros I'd built, and there was a great online support community. (Stack Overflow is an incredible resource). I still work in VB.NET but i also use C#, R, and a bit of Python.

And of course, my VB.NET usage was all industrial test automation, it's the closest language to the VBA/VB6 that all the engineers were familiar with, easiest way for them to get comfortable with our solution.

fail back?

Yup. You've heard of defense in layers? Well, VB is a leaky sieve that you can try from different angles as each layer fails.

So... you didn't hear this from me. This certainly was from some other engineer tasked with getting $THING done in a corporate environment where everything was locked down and noone had admin. (Never mind that anything on the floor had to have the password taped under the keyboard - or to save time, monitor.) I mean, someone had admin, but it wasn't really obvious who in the plant did and the ones who supposedly did had bad privileges set.

So you try to do something absurd like copy a log file automatically in the event of a line crash to a network store. But you can't run the nice application that shadow copies without admin. So you try a batch file, but no dice. Then you try VBA via Excel, and that sorta works, but now you've got to keep Excel running as a monitor, and that garfs up occasionally when the operator alt-tab-resets-power-to-everything. So you try a VBscript, and find that you can plonk that down in the Windows Startup folder and it sorta just works and thank god that's not an issue anymore we can just get back to fixing the line.

Every time it fails you can try again from a slightly different vantage point, retreating further as it fails, perhaps appropriately, you need to spend a day on the phone with tech support and get the damn thing done right.

Sounds like horror stories I have heard about working in investment banks (or non-tech companies in general...)

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