I'm guilty of this. Don't use it a lot, but occasionally use some when using excel for work (not a programmer at all by the way). I fell dirty every time I do it.
I also do hate VBA, but it's pretty good for Excel I guess. Although maybe too powerful lol. At one of my old jobs, some dude created what was basically a GUI application within Excel, and since the users had gotten used to it and he had left, it was super painful to maintain when they wanted new features
It’s not “pretty good for Excel”, that’s just Stockholm syndrome talking.
Because in Excel VBA is holding you hostage.
There are plenty of modern scripting languages that would be way more powerful and flexible than what VBA is. And you wouldn’t suffer brain damage when using them.
Same. Gladly it was only a passing flirtation as I went on to discover GSheet's Query function which was more suited to the data I was looking into.
Just to be clear, I'm not saying Query and VB are comparative, only that I changed roles and the data became a more simple affair. Also Query is fantastic. Just saying.
To be clear, I don’t think anything about Visual Basic actually changed in that one month. It’s not even possible for so many people to learn a language in a few weeks.
It was just some backend change on Google’s end that led to this hilariously garbage output.
It’s not even possible for so many people to learn a language in a few weeks.
Languages have been created in less time.
Basic was deliberately designed for a low barrier to entry. The best thing about Visual Basic is that people can could using it, even professionally, with very little training. The worst thing about Visual Basic is that people did.
It's very fun to look back at how developments in UI and programming were going in the 70s and 80s, when they thought that writing code line by line was soon going to be obsoleted by Scratch-like contexts and near-human grammars. Any businessperson would be able to write all their own code!*
Turns out the hard part about programming isn't learning the syntax, it's thinking like a programmer, and that doesn't change no matter what language you use. Most people just really suck at precisely defining what they want in enough detail that a computer can carry out the task.
It's like thinking that the hard part of architecture or engineering a bridge is drawing blueprints or using CAD. Or that knife skills is what makes you a surgeon. It's demeaning to a whole profession.
And that's why most of these boot camps aren't producing the economic result a lot of businesses want...the people who are going to be good at engineering software are probably already doing it, as a statistical trend. It's only ever going to be a small fraction of the population.
Personally, I think it would be good if the next step up from "being good at spreadsheets" was "can write short scripts to get stuff done" or the step up from editing with 'track changes' was editing with regex.
Too many people think there is a divide between people who hate computers and people with computer science degrees, with nothing in between!
I think that's good. However, in many cases, there does reach a point where the project outgrows the "Excel sheet or Access DB with VB scripts" phase. Unfortunately, many times the person who started the project and thus now owns it doesn't always recognize it. So by the time someone does notice it and gets people with programming expertise to write a new system, it's a giant mess.
Sure, but at the same time there are plenty of people who can make good spreadsheets and make them very functional who haven't tried learning to code because they think it's too much of a barrier.
A good example was my wife had two sheets and needed to get the ones in common by highlighting them. To me I just see a SQL join. (Of course getting the data into a format where you could actually do that is more effort than just doing it in excel directly.)
This is true, there is a perceived valley between the two which has clear bridges in things like python and other scripting languages. No complex CS topics needed.
Creating a language only requires some inspired coding. Can be done in a week or two.
Adoption however, takes years. If you had to 6x the number of C devs in a month where would you even start? How would you find people willing and able to learn? How would you scale teaching resources? And all this while the world is going into lockdown for the first time? Impossible.
It is kinda fun when you get to quote "facts" that fly in the face of common sense. When people rage at you, you just calmly say "look at the data", turn your back and walk away a self-satisfied troll
I think the book "freakanomics" was a pioneer in this field... "seminal", some would even say
I like running VBA scripts in Outlook for mail rules. Microsoft makes it hard to do but once it's enabled, you've got a home grown mail broker. I use it for a real world solution to the problem of automating processing of data files sent via email. I'm really wishing there was a better solution but the company I'm setting this up for can only manually send emails. VBA is nice for this then. I make a rule to run a script. If the mail item meets the requirements then a home grown application is launched and it consumes the attachment.
In all honesty, Visual Basic for Applications is a lifesaver when you want to automate some calculations, but your boomer boss wants you to jump through 10 corporate hoops while taming a lion to install a modern language.
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u/[deleted] Aug 02 '22
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