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Comment by ls612 | Hacker News Reader

VBScript must be different from Excel Visual Basic right? Because there’s a lot of people who still use that.

VBScript is in a .vbs file and run from the command line. There are still lots of tools in office and windows that use this like the command line licensing tools olk.vbs and slmgr.vbs so this is an odd security over functionality decision.

Excel macros are written in this by fortunate decisions in the article below, not sure if the windows cscript and wscript tools that execute vbs have dependency ties to excel https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2006/06/16/my-first-billg-rev... like outlook does to the word editor dlls.

I'd be fascinated to learn what a previous employer will do with all the vbscripts I wrote on Windows XP to drive various things of theirs. They have to maintain things for 20 to 30 years and they are basically snapshots in time. When I was there in the mid 00s they still had a Windows 95 test bench that ran software that only worked there. So I guess there's my answer: they'll keep the Win XP boxes around as long as they need to.

It’s weird to think that be best versions of windows are older than my entire professional career by this point.

> So I guess there's my answer: they'll keep the Win XP boxes around as long as they need to.

Anything that can be virtualized should be virtualized.

And airgapped from as many things as possible in existence, I hope.

You either have an airgap or you don't.

I think they mean firewalls and network segmentation.

Yep, fortunately they are airgapped (though they do have USB ports)

Aren't excel macros VBA, not VBScript? Different language and a different execution engine.

Yes, they are. Similar in some ways, but different.

I doubt if they'll ever be able to remove VBA. Way too much legacy code... the customers would mutiny.

Since Python is being added to Excel... I wouldn't be surprised if they phase that out (excel macros) in favor of it (Python).

Yeah, this article doesn’t do a great job of disambiguating among VBA (in Excel, Word, etc. and probably sticking around), VBScript in the browser (in Explorer, defunct), and desktop scripting VBScript (now deprecated). The Wikipedia articles for VBA and VBScript seem to suggest that VBA is an embedded implementation of Visual Basic (pre .Net) whereas VBScript is a separate scripting language with similar syntax and features.

Yes, vbscript is the default scripting language for windows. Many viruses have been spread because .vbs files were set to auto-run: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/ILOVEYOU

VBS is basically VBA without any of the typing/early binding, i.e. everything is a Variant.

I seem to recall a couple of other pesky nuances.

One thing I thought was a win decades ago in the ASP/pre-jQuery days was being able to tell where the code would execute based upon language.vVBSsript on the server; JS in the browser.

JS seems like an out-of-body experience as it is.

I built dozens of web sites using JScript server-side...

I did a lot of classic ASP development with VBscript on the server side.

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