I found a great link the other day describing the decision to drop VBA in the next version of Mac Office.
Here it is
Well worth a read (its long mind), although I’m not sure if it gives those of us in the Windoze world any guidance for the fate of our beloved VBA.
In the ‘Future of VBA’ session at the conf I estimated 2020 something. Anyone else prepared to stick their neck out?
If you have time to read that whole post and all the comments (and you probably shouldn’t!)(I still did it though – thats another hour of my life I’ll never get back). But if you do there are some really juicy gossipy tidbits. All pure blog sphere gossip, could be completely untrue, in fact almost certainly is untrue actually.
Jonathan said: ‘Steven Sinofsky (at the time the Group VP in charge of Office) has made several public statements that VBA would remain in for “at least the next two full product cycles” of Office. The first of those is Office 2007’
Richard said: ‘nd that office for x86-64 is dropping VBA support.’ [Anyone else heard this? I’m not convinved]
Nick Hodge? Nick Hodge? Oh, its the other one, not the ‘real’ one.
Various: a version of .net for MacOS might solve all the issues (and re-align the Mac and Win programmabilty story)
Various: Dropping VBA is the start of the end for MacBU.
One interesting factor from a business POV is that the single shining USP (unique selling point) of Mac Office is Win Office compatibility I’d have thought? surely?
I don’t recall ever reading advice that dumping your USP was going to improve business.
Also interesting was the mention of difficulty filling vacant roles in the MacBU. I’ve seen this mentioned elsewhere about MS in general, and the fashion to want to work at Google instead.
There is a good technical explanation of some of the guts of VBA that are almost universally derided by the commentors. Personally I suspect that code is hard to maintain because it was coded to eek out the maximum performance on a platform less powerful than a modern mobile phone. Not because the coders were ‘brain dead’. (That and the fact there are few C coders still coding now)
I had my win 3.11 lapper with Office 5.0 at the conf, circa 1993 vintage.
80486 proc, 640k RAM, 163 Mb Hard drive. [Edit – caught red-handed by Harlan, there is 3 Mb Extended Ram too]:

VBA was conceived, designed, coded, built and tested before that time, and worked acceptably. And I bet some of the guts of the Excel calc engine hail from that era too.
I really don’t agree with the often stated modern view that performance is not an issue anymore. Maybe not if you are waiting for a web or database connection or user input action , but for the number crunching I see and do, performance is extremely important. What about you?
Cheers
Simon