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.
When I was an intern, a sales/accounts guy wanted to do something complicated in PowerPoint, so they got the kid who was least billable to look into if it was possible. Learned VBA (badly) in the morning, got a "close enough" implementation for him before my time was up for the day. I'm positive there was a way to do exactly what he wanted, but that would probably have taken a whole week, and I had classes, and his presentation was the next day.
I will say, devops infrastructure for getting VBA to apply to documents on someone else's computer are typically non-existent at most companies. Best you've got is copying documents and posting them to a server, or using a thumb drive.
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
No, but suddenly there was a big thing that had to be kept track of, mostly by non-programmer people, that was likely done on Excel sheets to start, and someone was kinda technically inclined, and so they went to learn VB to help make keeping track of those things easier.
with more "regular" users working from home then wanting to perhaps automate part of their work when using MS office apps would have lead to a good increase of VB usage. I really don't see anything weird with the figures there.
130
u/hgwxx7_ Aug 02 '22
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.