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Comment by JohnStrangeII | Hacker News Reader

It's not just for legacy purposes. I've written a few useful personal tools in Purebasic, for instance. BASIC dialects tend to provide the functionality needed and can be handy for quickly throwing something together when you don't have the time to deal with GUI frameworks and complex libraries. You can also use Python or Go, of course, but they do not have integrated IDE and do not have a rich command set in the core language. Easy deployment and compact executables are also a plus of some existing BASIC dialects. If I had the money / the investment in a license would give me a good ROI, then I'd also pay for Xojo, for example.

Whatever gets the job done without wasting time.

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> Whatever gets the job done without wasting time.

Completely agreed. My point isn't that these tools can get the job done, but that I see too many people praising them because they can get the job done. There is a difference between done and useful. I can throw together a market model in excel quite fast and easily, its "done". It might even be useful in your case, but please don't give high praise to it because no real world task has ever ended with that task. Everything you will create, especially software will be reused. That's the whole point and power of software. These tools make it incredibly hard to reuse anything. I think we should have higher standards for our tools, especially when whole companies are being built on it (don't think google here, think portfolio management companies and Excel).

Edit: I would like to include an example of a spoon. I can bash in a small nail using it, it will not be good, but it will be done. It will stick one piece of wood to another. but would you praise the spoon as a hammer replacement?

In a life sciences research center I worked with, the work was definitely not done after those scientists got their csv processed files out of the cell reader own data format, generated using their home made VB.NET tool.

It didn't matter, those files were done used as input data into Tableau for further processing, where they could carry on doing the work that actually mattered to them.

I never said you cannot do stuff using VB.NET. Why is this so hard to understand? My point is was VB.NET the best way to do it? Should we praise the tool as good? How do you know that this excel thing, which does not support testing, does not provide feedback when stuff goes wrong will not blow up in your face like that COVID excel[1] from UK did? Please go back and re read my example about the spoon.

[1] https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-54423988

Yes it was, those people were comfortable with VBA, asked IT for VB.NET and were able to quickly proceed with the work that actually mattered to them.

This is the daily reality of industries whose software isn't the main service, not doing beautiful software to reach HN first page.

I think you are misinterpreting my point. I am not saying it cannot be done. I am saying it has higher risk and we should not normalize it just because it gets stuff done. I would like you to actually address the point about the public issues posed by these setups like I pointed out in the COVID case.

Also, you said

> asked IT for VB.NET and were able to quickly proceed with the work that actually mattered to them

I have already addressed this. > We just make it work not because its possible, but because nobody wants to go through the requisition forms.

Edit: Also just insisting that whatever makes it work should be used sounds like a carpenter who is proud of using a spoon as a hammer. Even if you are not a carpenter, I don't think anyone would feel good about using spoon as a hammer in a DIY project.

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