Ask HN: What is the modern equivalent of Visual Basic? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: What is the modern equivalent of Visual Basic?

12 pointsmemset10 comments

I just got married, and am working on a little app to download our sundry financial data via .ofx and let us do some light categorization and reporting. Nothing too complicated.

In order to make this at all usable, I more or less need:

1. A running instance of a db (mongo, postgres)

2. A web server

3. My python application which knows how to read and parse and store our data

4. Some frontend code to display charts (vue.js, chart.js)

5. Design a light HTTP API layer to surface data to said frontend

It seems like a lot! Lots of layers in different systems, and lots of documentation across different libraries:

1. DB schema

2. HTTP restful schema

3. Figure out which pieces of Vuetify (or bootstrap) to use for my UX

4. vue controllers

In a previous life, I might have cracked open Visual Basic, written my logic, bound to a local MS Access database, and drag-and-drop form controls for a GUI. I'd be done by now.

Is there a modern equivalent of the sheer ease and speed of VB programming for small utilities that I'd want to write for myself?

Comparing VB desktop app dev to web app dev is a little bit apples to oranges.

Regardless, Django gives you everything you need on a silver platter, with fantastic documentation. To make your life easier, you could probably just use SQLite for the DB, and just run your app locally w/ the dev server to avoid having to deal with deployments, security, and possibly exposing your financial data online.

Maybe avoid Vue/APIs to start, and just do old school backend rendered templates. Bootstrap + jQuery + Highcharts will get you very far.

Since you brought up VB though, maybe an Electron based desktop app is actually what you want?

You could use Google Sheets. It supports scripts (via Google Apps Script, a JavaScript derivative), allows you to generate charts and from some quick Googling it seems like there are approaches for importing OFX data as well.

Check out Anvil: https://anvil.works/

There's a good recent interview about it at: https://www.pythonpodcast.com/anvil-web-application-developm...

Does it need to be a web app? VB isn't web (afaik).

You could probably do it all in python using sqlite, matplotlib and tkinter. MPL provides tk widgets for displaying its graphs.

For drag and drop GUI dev, maybe this? http://www.bitflipper.ca/rapyd/

VB6 active server pages!

I write small command line utilities with python and SQLite for this sort of thing. Add in some matplotlib to display the charts/graphs.

It gets the job done.

If you still have the software why not just get it working in a compatible vm? Seems easier than learning all that.. Unless you just want something to learn, nothing wrong with that of course.

Why not just use VB?

C# WinForms? That's what I'd use for this.

meteor makes a lot of decisions and joins a lot of the dots for you, but its not python.

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