51–60 of 269 posts
You know why Visual Basic was the best programming language ever made? Because it wasn't a programming language. Nerds just can't wrap their heads around this idea: no normal person wants to be a programmer. But they do want to make little custom things to help them get stuff done in life. Just like nobody wants to be a plumber, but they do want to be able to fix their faucet.
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…
Once the screen can be wildly resized, it just becomes too murky. Maybe have the programmer do it manually for 2-3 sizes and then let some AI model interpolate the sizes in between?
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.
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…
I think Delphi perfected it with the data aware components. If you had a DB you could throw together a CRUD application with several screens with tablegrids and edit fields without any code at all. Even Master:Detail relations are taken care of. (Of course it's not pretty and it's going to miss validation, etc...)
You know why Visual Basic was the best programming language ever made? Because it wasn't a programming language. Nerds just can't wrap their heads around this idea: no normal person wants to be a programmer. But they do want to make little custom things to help them get stuff done in life. Just like nobody wants to be a plumber, but they do want to be able to fix their faucet.
Sorta like Excel, then?
Visual 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.
So? Why HASN'T anyone built Visual Basic for the web?
Ryan 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…
honestly, i kind if miss vb6's simplicity: you could create a "proof of concept" in the matter of hours, without having to bother with compiling tools, libraries or anything like that. everything just worked.
So? Why HASN'T anyone built Visual Basic for the web?
Even the bridge at the end back to their product was well done (they're usually abrupt).
Excellent piece of journalism and content marketing