So? Why HASN'T anyone built Visual Basic for the web?
Something Pretty Right: The History and Legacy of Visual Basic
21–30 of 269 posts
Re: Something Pretty Right: The History and Legacy of Visual Basic
#22What are some contemporary clones of VB6, still maintained and useful?
Re: Something Pretty Right: The History and Legacy of Visual Basic
#23It 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.
The biggest problem is that it's just impossible to use modern coding tools with them. If we could fix that, so much would work better. Even the best efforts at it haven't really worked out, since there are some truly sprawling VBA codebases out there (tried Rubberduck with a big MS Access app for a business - reliably crashed it).
Re: Something Pretty Right: The History and Legacy of Visual Basic
#24It 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…
In science and engineering I would say LabVIEW has taken off. I doubt there’s a university in the world that doesn’t have it running in some capacity. Without learning LV I doubt I would have learnt to code.
Re: Something Pretty Right: The History and Legacy of Visual Basic
#25Don't listen to fighter-pilots stuck in busses.
That's such an easy thing to do as a product. All the comments you see are all clamouring for some set of features that will just complicate everything. Yet a majority of the users have absolutely no issues continuing on with what they already have. You need to be able to figure out how many quiet happy customers you have if you want to make any big breaking changes...
Re: Something Pretty Right: The History and Legacy of Visual Basic
#26What are some contemporary clones of VB6, still maintained and useful?
There is only 1 such viable product, Xojo. https://www.xojo.com/
I haven’t used it since it was called RealBasic ages ago.
Re: Something Pretty Right: The History and Legacy of Visual Basic
#27Was a huge fan of the product. Joined the VB team as a PM in 1996 and worked for a few years while my health declined. The whole division was beautifully run. The people were, to a person, amazing human beings. I honestly think I stumbled into the best team Microsoft had before or since. The Microsoft campus was verdant and tranquil. Everything you sort of imagine Apple would be to work at was true on that team, and has never actually been the case at Apple. At the same time our first child was born. For me, it was a time of pure magic. All that and I got to work on VB.
Re: Something Pretty Right: The History and Legacy of Visual Basic
#28Hilarious quote (notwithstanding the fact that bus drivers usually have to work shifts, also on weekends):
> Almost all Visual Basic 6 programmers were content with what Visual Basic 6 did. They were happy to be bus drivers: to leave the office at 5 p.m. (or 4:30 p.m. on a really nice day) instead of working until midnight; to play with their families on weekends instead of trudging back to the office. They didn't lament the lack of operator overloading or polymorphism in Visual Basic 6, so they didn't say much.
The voices that Microsoft heard, however, came from the 3 percent of Visual Basic 6 bus drivers who actively wished to become fighter pilots. These guys took the time to attend conferences, to post questions on CompuServe forums, to respond to articles. Not content to merely fantasize about shooting a Sidewinder missile up the tailpipe of the car that had just cut them off in traffic, they demanded that Microsoft install afterburners on their buses, along with missiles, countermeasures and a head-up display. And Microsoft did.
...and it applies not only to Visual Basic, but also to many open source programming languages today. There are the users who are happy with the way things are, who are content to do their job and don't say much. And there are those clamoring for that one more feature that they just have to have, and those are the ones that eventually get heard, adding more complexity and cruft for everyone else.
Re: Something Pretty Right: The History and Legacy of Visual Basic
#29I spent a couple weeks downloading a pirated vb6 with a download manager that could resume. I think it was 1GB, on dial-up. Once I had it installed I had like 6mb free space. I made a bunch of AO-progz and an mp3 player. And a bunch of friends in #vb6 on aol, which I keep to this day.
:) we probably crossed paths, good times
Checking in. I learned OSCAR and YMSG before HTTP. I recently tried to find a modern vb6 type setup that wasn't DOM (electron style) based and works cross platform. Best I found was javafx and scene builder.
Re: Something Pretty Right: The History and Legacy of Visual Basic
#30So? Why HASN'T anyone built Visual Basic for the web?
Well "Visual Basic for the web" can mean many things. If you mean just an app builder online, then there are hundreds of options, the most popular probably being Retool or Bubble. Or do you mean run locally like Visual Basic and then output to an intranet web browser? Also, do you need basic language, or will Javascript be enough? For me, what is important is the spirit of Visual Basic, easy to use local applications that can be distributed as standalone apps, and an amazing component ecosystem