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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

#31

Post by illiarian »

dvdhsu wrote: post #2

It 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…

> visual programming has never taken off, despite countless attempts over the past few decades.

It has, in some niches like Unreal Blueprints.

I think one of the reasons it doesn't become more popular is because most visual programming is just a more cumbersome and slow way of programming. It's stringing the same concepts together in the same way, but slowly and tediously with a mouse.

Non-tech users wouldn't know what to do with it. Power users would rather program directly.

Re: Something Pretty Right: The History and Legacy of Visual Basic

#33

Post by duncans »

qup wrote: post #11

I 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.

It would have been around a few 100MB as most hard drives were less than 1GB back then.

Re: Something Pretty Right: The History and Legacy of Visual Basic

#34

Post by interfixus »

rob74 wrote: post #28

Hilarious 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 la…

For what it's worth, I am a bus driver these days; a real one, no metaphor involved. And I sufficently disliked and mistrusted Visual Basic that already in the mid nineties I instigated a complete ban on any vb**run.dll on all computers under my jurisdiction. Mainly a heuristic: VB applications tended overwhelmingly to not being worth the inevitable trouble.

I have proudly carried this curmudgery into the present century, these days applied to Java runtimes and Mono libs.

Re: Something Pretty Right: The History and Legacy of Visual Basic

#35

Post by ShadowBanThis01 »

VB was the one thing that most closely approached the promise of object orientation: "bolt-together," "off-the-shelf" components that you could build software with.

In VB you could slap together a CRUD app in days, with VBXs (later renamed OCXs). I worked for a company where a bunch of programmers turned up their nose at VB and insisted on using C++, and then they got canned when the VB prototype functioned perfectly sufficiently for a production app.

Re: Something Pretty Right: The History and Legacy of Visual Basic

#36

Post by tragomaskhalos »

There was more to VB than just guis though - one could use it to build COM components far more easily than with C++ - the fact that a string was just String rather than the miasma of competing flavours that abounded in Visual C++ was worth the price of admittance alone.

Delphi was arguably best in breed here, but always suffered from lacking the Microsoft badge.

Re: Something Pretty Right: The History and Legacy of Visual Basic

#37

Post by ShadowBanThis01 »

tomcam wrote: post #27

Was 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…

I don't know who approved the inclusion of VB in Word, but that person is a hero.

WordBasic was a career-maker for me. I worked at a Big-6 consulting firm and used Word to parse and rewrite thousands of SQL modules (that resided on a VAX, no less) with a Word macro when the DB structure changed. It ran for 11 hours and saved man-weeks.

That was after I had used WordBasic to add tons of features to Word for our doc team, which we take for granted today: cross-file searches, cross-file page numbering, style enforcement... just incredible.

It's sad to see the mess that Word has become, however. And Windows too.

Re: Something Pretty Right: The History and Legacy of Visual Basic

#38

Post by badsectoracula »

illiarian wrote: post #31
dvdhsu wrote: post #2

It 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…

> visual programming has never taken off, despite countless attempts over the past few decades. It has, in some niches like Unreal Blueprints. I think one of the reasons it doesn't become more popular is because most visual programming is just a more cumbersome and slow way of programming. It's stringing the same concepts together in the same way, but slowly and tediously with a mouse. Non-tech users wouldn't know wh…

> It has, in some niches like Unreal Blueprints. [...] I think one of the reasons it doesn't become more popular is because most visual programming is just a more cumbersome and slow way of programming. It's stringing the same concepts together in the same way, but slowly and tediously with a mouse.

The latter bit basically perfectly describes Unreal Blueprints :-P.

It was hyped when it first came out and for some time (years) it was well received - until people had to deal with the spaghetti mess others made in blueprints.

Visual languages are fine as long as they are limited to high level concepts, but UB not only is not that (there is even a type cast node!) but instead of being there in addition to Unreal Script, it actually replaced it, forcing many people who didn't want to bother with C++ (especially Unreal's flavor of C++) to use blueprints.

Epic supposedly learned from this and UE5 at some point will have a new scripting language, but AFAIK so far it has been vaporware. Meanwhile i (i am into gamedev and have worked with UE) increasingly see people get disillusioned by Blueprints.

Re: Something Pretty Right: The History and Legacy of Visual Basic

#39

Post by StopHammoTime »

When I was younger, I HATED VB6. Even today, I still loathe some of the weird apps that I had to support running in Excel with VBA. I truly never thought about the power of VB until I read this article - those apps I loathed so much probably wouldn't have existed if it weren't for VB. I ran into so many tools that provided immediate value and go things done, even if it was dodgy or weird.

Even though I'm a Platform Engineer these days, I hate the tooling that we have to do deal with today. Instead of having people build solutions, we all need to understand hundreds (if not thousands) of cloud/vendor-specific APIs. The actual solution itself is almost a by-product of the job of getting in run in the cloud.

Maybe don't bring back VB, but a world where we can deliver solutions quickly and effectively without spending hours debugging dependency issues between releases.

Re: Something Pretty Right: The History and Legacy of Visual Basic

#40

Post by est »

lukasb wrote: post #21

So? Why HASN'T anyone built Visual Basic for the web?

The web is a mess compared to text/binary data we had to deal with in the 90s and early 00s.

Personal Computers used to be a productivity oriented tool. VB6 was designed to handle business data. Today mobile phones are like sentiment manipulation devices or consumerism sinkhole. Could iPhone owners created apps on their iPhones? No. It's a ready-only OS.

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