VBA - it will be missed

In 1996 Microsoft started licensing Visual Basic for Applications to third parties. In 2007, 1 July, they stopped doing this. According to Microsoft themselves, they expect no "significant enhancements to VBA" and they recommend their customers to look into other solutions.

Part of this strategy is probably their decision to drop support for VBA in MS Office 2008 for Mac OS X. Tragically, Microsoft recommends its VBA users on the Mac to start using AppleScript instead. This breaks compatibility with the Windows version of MS Office completely for all macro authors. On the other hand, compatibility was already limited, as the Mac version was unable to use embedded elements from applications that only are available for Windows.

VBA in some ways is a horrible language, when it comes to memory management and performance and code structure. However, it was wonderfully easy to put together a working and useful small program in just a few minutes. It was right there, in Word and the other applications. There was never any question of getting the right version and ensuring compatibility or installing additional software. It was there, and it was usable.

Whatever comes next has something to live up to.