71–80 of 269 posts
Nothing really quite feels as approachable for a beginner as VB did, those days.
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 cen…
In the 2000s VB was rusty but amazed me when I remembered that pedantically (shame on me) criticized the VB developers of the 90s against the C/C++ hardcores. It was on high school though. Nerd issues.
Who else here followed the path of QBASIC > Visual Basic > ASP.NET > general web development as a kid?
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…
Visual Basic was so good. Growing up all I knew was Windows, so being able to create fairly reasonable looking GUI apps at the time seemed like magic. I remember building a "web browser" in VB, I put that in quotes because it was really just an IE webview/control wrapped in my own custom UI with features like not recording browser history. I remember making a "virus" and sending it to a mate, and when he opened it, y…
Haha, I built one as well. Couldn't have the parents accidentally discover what sites their horny teenager visited when they were at work, even if all I could rely on with 21600bps was written smut.
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.
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.
I do understand that most people don't want to be programmers, and that's fine. At the same time, professional software development needs professional software developers.
Sure, most of us like to be able to fix a faucet, but would you trust a hobbyist plumber to design and maintain the toilets of the Yankee Stadium?
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.
I'm coming to the exact opposite conclusion: A lot of people benefit from programmin a little.
Which, at the time when VB came out, was a very popular opinion. Still enough computers around with BASIC as their interface. User-focused databases like dBase. Spreadsheets.
VB was a bit in the uncanny valley between "professional" and user-focused programming, which is the main source for most negative opinions about it.
I still think that more end-user programming is the right choice, but now that our software runs on someone else's computer or is completely walled off due to manufacturer choice or language cruft & learning curves, we've got our own little priesthood. I don't believe that "AI" will change this, but we would certainly deserve it.
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…
VB6 had thousands of third-party libraries distributed as VBX/OCX controls. VB.NET had effectively zero, because it could only use the new WinForms controls. You could upgrade your codebase to VB.NET using a wizard (that would often fail), but if your software relied on OCX, there was no way forward.