this post was submitted on 11 Oct 2023
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WTF, seriously? VBA feels more like a scripting addon (which I suppose it is), not something to build wholesale CRITICAL programs with.
They didn't start out building an enterprise critical application, they normally started as some little script someone built to make their work faster. Then they shared it with the team, built more features, and 20 years later hundreds of staff are using it and if it dissappeared they would be screwed.
Plus the data in them is often the only record of critical data (in their defense, the spreadsheets are typically stored somewhere where the backup process will back them up).
It's me, I'm that guy lmfao, although by the time I left it was considerably more complex. I have "real" languages under my belt, but it was a banking environment and VBA was all I had (Which even that kinda surprised me lol).
I was hooked into the windows API and doing all sorts of stuff and yea before leaving I did distribute stand alone parts of it (The full system was a beast, 90% of my job was automated towards the end lololol)
Honestly, VBA is more powerful than people give it credit for, just a PITA to implement some things
Nothing is more permanent than a temporary solution
At my old job, we had a VBA script that would:
Thirty page custom reports per client within 2 minutes (when nothing broke). It allows you to interact and automate across the Microsoft Suite. That is one of the reasons why it is indispensable to many companies
This is definitely giving me flashbacks during my time in the corporate world. There was one report that was replete with copy and pasting, the poor lady who used to do it apparently had to pull all-nighters doing it. I rebuilt everything in Access using some SQL and the new process only took 15 minutes to run.
The things done in excel might not be critical per-se, but macros are used and abused a lot and many companies can be affected by their dependence on workflows refined over the years.
Haha, don't I know it. I've had to work with some of them in a past life. Messy and also very scary at how they underpin million dollar decisions.
This is true for software in general.
The same description can be given to workshops (and you know they already exist) that do the same stuff with ChatGPT.
It's a scripting language.
A solid, verbose, diverse scripting language that gives you impressive control over Windows environments.
If some people are delivering malware or phishing, that sucks, but it doesn't negate the languages merit.
It would be the same as ceasing production of spray paint because of taggers.
The ends don't justify the means.
They have an alternative called Powershell that can do what VBS does and more. Its a modern and actively developed scripting language that Microsoft undoubtedly expect you to port your code into, that is if you cant use a cloud product first wink wink
It will be a shit show of course, at least for those orgs that dont block this depreciation outright via whatever method comes out. Still, there is putty to patch the holes.
I suppose Microsoft Access has better options now you can define the steps in macros, but I think it's still needed for many of the more fiddly bits.
Yup, I was the guy who wrote vba script to calculate performance of network mobile and export chart to ppt files.
Many critcal engineering and financial calculations rely on vba scripts