Comment by hypermachine | Hacker News Reader

Comment by hypermachine | Hacker News Reader

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I suppose this is as good a time as any to mention that we are working on an open source interpreter compatible with VB6/VBA that can run on the web. We didn't plan to make the announcement today but since Microsoft is releasing their news, I might as well let HN know about ours. We are planning to do a proper launch and release during the summer since currently our editor (which integrates collaborative editing and version control) and the other parts of our platform are not ready yet. For now only the core language interpreter and some basic widgets are usable. As for the UI issue, responsiveness is indeed a big problem for traditional absolute positioning desktop apps versus the modern flexbox standard. However, it is not a very challenging problem to tackle if your widgets are standardized and that the UI builder supports easy testing of the three major screen sizes. In other words, as long as you don't need tremendous control over how every pixel of the UI looks, the drag-and-drop style GUI building transfers quite well over to the web.

What’s Microsoft’s news?

Microsoft Power Fx – A low-code general purpose programming language

https://github.com/microsoft/power-fx

Why?

Because current low-code development tools boxes you in and are extremely inflexible. They are walled gardens, antithetical to general purpose computing. JavaScript and Python are ultimately not as beginner friendly as they like to claim to be [0]. Dependency management problems (Python), various footguns from the earlier days (JavaScript), difficult to rapid prototype UI and CRUD systems (both). VB and VBA are tried and tested technologies (the alternative I have considered is Lua, but Lua's ecosystem is fragmented because of the focus on embedding). Their current high popularity is in spite of Microsoft's attempts to deprecate and move users to .NET and JavaScript. They are possibly the world's most successful low-code platform.

Embarcadero Delphi has become irrelevant, SAP is not accessible to most consumers. The newer generation of platforms like Retool and Bubble are all designed with software engineers first in mind when it comes to extensability and customisation; they are very inaccessible to layman if you stray from the well-beaten path. They all force you to choose between a false dichotomy of either pure GUI and no code, or an obtuse API that requires a CS degree and five years of fullstack software engineering experience to understand.

In VB6/VBA, calling Windows DLL via COM was trivial. The entire power of the operating system was at your disposal in a few simple readable lines. I want to make a similar system for the modern web and APIs. iOS's Shortcuts may look pretty but they are a step backwards from the HyperCard days.

[0] The litmus test I use is this: Can I teach somebody from a non-STEM background how to code and more importantly get them to integrate it in their own workflow in an afternoon? With VBA/VB6, yes. Everything is a click away. They had hot reloading in 1995. It took JavaScript 20 years to reinvent the wheel. Good luck explaining even how the packaging dependency system works with Python.

Since Python is the most popular beginner language, I am also inclined to point out that their standard for "rapid prototyping" is Django. Your average Excel user is more likely to throw together a quick app in VB than study Mozilla's "Your Local Library Website" Django tutorial just to build a CRUD app.

I have to say that I've seen it done with Blockpad (https://blockpad.net) but for engineering workflows.

It is still trivial in VB.NET.

In fact what I have learned doing a couple of consulting projects for a life sciences companies, is how many of Excel VBA powerusers eventually get IT to give them VB.NET and carry on from there.

They don't think twice about adding the DLL/COM libraries required to access the laboratory data readers for accessing cell data values.

> Dependency management problems

VBA's biggest weakness is that its open source community and ecosystem is non-existent, so you always end up remaking the wheel. It's just easier making either python or javascript the default franca lingua.

We are adding support to call WebAssembly and GraalVM supported libraries.

imo that’s worse than python’s largely solved dependency management issues. Most people just use conda and it’s good enough. Is it as good as competing languages? No, but it’s still better than VBA’s ecosystem (including your solution) by miles. That said, I think it’s awesome that you’re still supporting VBA veterans since MS left them out in the cold.

That's a separate issue from dependency management entirely. Check out Repl.it's universal package manager if you want an idea of how we are solving the problem.

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