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Comment by pizza234 | Hacker News Reader

There is a middle ground between automation and full-blown programming languages.

In the past, this was represented by Visual Basic 6. For the use case presented - large organizations with considerable time spent in repetitive tasks - probably there has always been in the org a non-programmer who could hack together a VB6 program for the benefit of the colleagues. I remember even a person describing himself a programmer because he could use Excel (which can be considered close to the middle ground position in the automation<>programming languages spectrum).

There were/are lot of small tools around programmed in VB6, which are probably very low quality from an engineering perspective, but do the job.

As a matter of fact, I wonder why the VB6 spirit hasn't been carried to the present. As far as I read, Delphi's the closest, but I've never used it.

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I agree. One of the great things with VB was you had an instant "programming environment" when you opened it from Excel. But I think learning VB feels like a waste since you can only use it in a limited domain.

Learning Python is just as easy as VB and can be used across many domains, but it's hard to set up an environment (install packages, managing env's, etc.). I thought it'd be cool if you could make Python work like VB from Google Sheets, which lead to Wax[0]. It lets people run Python from Sheets with zero infrastructure. If anyone has internal apps that are heavily dependent on Sheets, I'd really appreciate your feedback.

0 - https://www.wax.run/

I see the VB spirit coming back with projects like streamlit. Super easy to prototype simple things, logical order of processing. Really reminds me of the good old BASIC. No function definitions, no classes, no callbacks.

> No function definitions, no classes, no callbacks.

But VB had all those things.

There was a time when VB came in two flavors. I believe VB5 was this way: The regular version that most of us bought allowed us to use classes, but not to create them. I know for myself, this enabled me to ease my way into OOP, because I could experience the benefits without any of the major pitfalls. If you wanted to create classes, you had to buy or download an extra package, that I never bothered with. I was basically a procedural programmer who could use classes supplied to me by somebody else.

Turning VB into a full blown professional development language akin to C# was, in my view, a mistake. It kind of erased the reason for "the rest of us" to use Basic. I switched to Python instead.

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