Something Pretty Right: The History and Legacy of Visual Basic
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Re: Something Pretty Right: The History and Legacy of Visual Basic
#2It was surprising to us (here at Retool) that visual programming has never taken off, despite countless attempts over the past few decades. (That's why we started Retool, after all.) But Visual Basic is probably the product that came closest, and that's why we wrote this homage to it. It, along with Filemaker, Hypercard, are products that we loved. And we always wished that they had flourished, since then we wouldn't have had to start Retool, hah! As Linus says (in the article):
> “For example, I personally believe that Visual Basic did more for programming than Object-Oriented Languages did,” Torvalds wrote, “yet people laugh at VB and say it's a bad language, and they've been talking about OO languages for decades. And no, Visual Basic wasn't a great language, but I think the easy DB interfaces in VB were fundamentally more important than object orientation is, for example.”
Re: Something Pretty Right: The History and Legacy of Visual Basic
#3Visual Basic 4 is when I fell in love with programming. I remember staying up late (school nights no less) just playing around and designing GUIs.
I had done some programming before with Pascal, C and even QBasic, but nothing was quite as fascinating as dragging and dropping fully functional controls and having them light up with functionality in minutes.
Up until a few years ago, I was still reaching out to WinForms / C# to build quick prototypes - maybe it was part nostalgia, but I didn't find anything comparable when it comes to quickly standing up a GUI prototype (for a LOB type of application, or a small utility / tool kind of thing).
Re: Something Pretty Right: The History and Legacy of Visual Basic
#4Ryan and David and team, I am so happy to see this posted!
I'm quoted a few places in it. Yes, the story about the origin of the phrase "fire an event" is true and correct. I could even tell you exactly where I was sitting and which way I was facing when that event fired.
Some things stick in your mind, doobies or not.
Also mentioned is the VBX. In some ways, this may have been the worst API I ever designed. It was so bad that Microsoft eventually replaced it with COM! But it was the most successful.
If anyone has any questions, fire a comment!
Re: Something Pretty Right: The History and Legacy of Visual Basic
#5There's a generation of programmers that fell into software development through Visual Basic. Maybe you could say the same about the Apple II/Commodore/ Sinclair/ BBC Micro generation of computers that booted up to a BASIC prompt.
Re: Something Pretty Right: The History and Legacy of Visual Basic
#6Visual Basic 4 is when I fell in love with programming. I remember staying up late (school nights no less) just playing around and designing GUIs. I had done some programming before with Pascal, C and even QBasic, but nothing was quite as fascinating as dragging and dropping fully functional controls and having them light up with functionality in minutes. Up until a few years ago, I was still reaching out to WinForms…
“Up until a few years ago, I was still reaching out to WinForms / C# to build quick prototypes”
What replaced them for you? I still use Windows forms a lot for prototypes and utilities and was curious if there is something else I should be looking at.
Re: Something Pretty Right: The History and Legacy of Visual Basic
#7It was surprising to us (here at Retool) that visual programming has never taken off, despite countless attempts over the past few decades. (That's why we started Retool, after all.) But Visual Basic is probably the product that came closest, and that's why we wrote this homage to it. It, along with Filemaker, Hypercard, are products that we loved. And we always wished that they had flourished, since then we wouldn't…
These are the original low-code tools. Easy to pick up and your average citizen developer could figure it out with some trial and error. So much lost productivity due to whatever happened in the next several decades.
Re: Something Pretty Right: The History and Legacy of Visual Basic
#8Ryan and David and team, I am so happy to see this posted! I'm quoted a few places in it. Yes, the story about the origin of the phrase "fire an event" is true and correct. I could even tell you exactly where I was sitting and which way I was facing when that event fired. Some things stick in your mind, doobies or not. Also mentioned is the VBX. In some ways, this may have been the worst API I ever designed. It was s…
Thanks, Michael! Finding your comments on HN about the design details of the original "Ruby" version of VB and VBX was part of my inspiration for writing this article in the first place. Your recollection of "firing an event" is my favorite kind of classic Silicon Valley story.
Re: Something Pretty Right: The History and Legacy of Visual Basic
#9When I was college my first programming job was writing CRUD UIs in VB (I think it was 4 or 5) for a local contract dev shop. I was only a sophomore at the time, and the money I made helped me pay for college.
I know people ripped on VB the language, but I still haven’t used anything to date that was as good and easy at creating Windows CRUD UIs.
Re: Something Pretty Right: The History and Legacy of Visual Basic
#10Ryan and David and team, I am so happy to see this posted! I'm quoted a few places in it. Yes, the story about the origin of the phrase "fire an event" is true and correct. I could even tell you exactly where I was sitting and which way I was facing when that event fired. Some things stick in your mind, doobies or not. Also mentioned is the VBX. In some ways, this may have been the worst API I ever designed. It was s…
Thanks for all your hard work! Without VB my career definitely wouldn't have happened.