Remember nine years ago when I posted about the future of vba? Neither did I, but I just re-read it. I think if we keep talking about how VBA is dead, it might actually die someday. Nah, probably not.
John at Global Electronic Trading has the latest VBA eulogy. He asked several VBA community members (including me) to answer four questions about the future of VBA. Here is my response to what killed VBA
[DK] Time killed it. Nothing last forever. Cobol developers were once in high demand. Now Cobol developers are in very high demand – both of them. Microsoft killed it by not updating the IDE or supporting VBA as a viable development platform. Had they invested in VBA, say by integrating .Net into Office the way they did with VB, then it still may have been a viable platform today. But even if that were true, time would kill it eventually.
The internet killed it by adopting Ajax. A lot of developer resources went to web apps and away from COM based development.Apple killed it by inventing the App Store. None of those developer resources came back to COM, they’re all developing mobile apps now.
So a bunch of stuff killed VBA, but all that means is that evolution killed it. MS evolved their development platform away from VBA just like they evolved away from ANSI C before that.
Go read the rest of the answers. You won’t be surprised by any of the answers, I’ll bet.
I draw two conclusions from this experience:
- I need to proof read my emails before I send them.
- I don’t care if VBA is dead. It still works for me now, I’m very effective with it, and I’m still solving real problems using it every day. If it’s dead, it’s the best damn corpse in the office.
