Visual Basic

Raised as a usability problem by 21 people on Hacker News over 19 years (2008–2026), in 19 threads.

People raised many different problems with Visual Basic, but no single problem has yet been raised by 3 people in 3 different months and threads.

Unreviewed issues were grouped by machine: Claude Haiku labelled each comment as a usability complaint, named what it's about and summed up the problem in a line, and a small model grouped similar problems. Nobody has checked them by hand. Expect mistakes.

The newest 23 complaints

Clicking non-visual controls like timers selects the form instead2026-10-05
Can't find how to reach Chapter 1; next button leads elsewhere2026-05-10
Site looks visually striking but is hard to use overall2026-05-10
Fixed layouts make translation painful, forcing extra buffer space for longer strings2025-10-19
Drop-down only lists members of the current class, so the user hunts for functions that are in the open file2023-09-12
Everything looks like the same unusable mess with nested tab groups and tree views2023-09-12
UI freezes and becomes choppy while the app performs work or waits on external calls2023-09-12
Modern coding tools can't be used with VBA, and Rubberduck crashes large Access apps2023-03-17
Form element identifiers in the Object Inspector are unintuitive, so developers forget to rename default names2022-05-06
Masses of weird, undocumented APIs made the language hard to learn2022-01-09
Default data control pattern leads to dead ends for business processes2021-08-14
Simple drag-and-drop hides state, so real projects get stuck inferring it2021-08-13
Author couldn't figure out how to package the app into one exe2020-05-21
Slow to boot, unintuitive naming, awkward access to .NET framework2020-03-14
Modal error dialog forces dismissal before the user can keep typing2020-01-15
Nested MDI windows are confusing when several files are open in the background2019-06-23
Tools fail in unexpected ways that are nearly impossible to diagnose2018-01-29
Attempted VB successors separate IDE from runtime, forcing edit-compile-run instead of live editing2017-12-24
Special LINE syntax with parentheses, dashes and BF flags is confusing and behaves unexpectedly, even as a variable name2016-09-28
Case-insensitive names, type coercion and the Is operator cause confusing bugs2015-04-24
Handling events for an array of objects requires jumping through many hoops2012-06-09
The language is poorly documented, making it hard to learn and use2009-10-25
Must remember Exit Function; assigning function name doesn't return2008-12-30