Something Pretty Right: The History and Legacy of Visual Basic

WPF is dead, now we have MAUI for both desktop and mobile development. Let's hope MS doesn't find a new shiny thing.

VB to VB.NET was more to do with .NET arriving with the .NET Framework, and one of the reasons for the .NET Framework was all about keeping up with the (at the time) amazing framework/core library that Java had. It was also about web front ends which of course VB6 could not do.

In the old days people used to custom-build massive CRUD desktop database applications for their company to use internally and I built some of those in VB6. Loads of UserControls nested inside each other, solutions with multiple DLLs, you could do it but it was really clunky. Error handling was rubbish. I had also built things in Java and could see what VB6 was missing. .NET fixed that.

So I guess the 3 percent of Visual Basic 6 bus drivers who actively wished to become fighter pilots were probably people who had used Java. Java was free, if you didnt want an IDE. Whereas VB6 was actually quite expensive (can anyone remember the cost of a VB6 Pro license?)

The WYSIWYG GUI builder that VB provided, I have never encountered afterwards again in quite that manner.

Now, in VBs heyday the field of UX design we now have as a profession adjacent to software development was in its infancy and was usually an implicit part of the developers job. What was lost with the demise of the RAD tools was a potentially shared medium of expression. Today designers build Potemkin villages in Figma and the likes, throw them over the fence and as a developer I then need to reverse-engineer them. How much more productive would it be if they didn't throw something over the fence but would actually build the UI in the same tool that the developer uses to write the logic behind it?

And another thing: I don't know if I had gotten into the field without BASIC. I started with QBasic, because it was the only thing readily available and switched over to VB when I got my hands on a students' edition. The thing that distinguished these two from educational environments like Scratch or Logo is that I could build actually useful stuff for myself with it.

They didn't: "Visual Basic's initial release in 1991 was followed by five major versions (not including an ill-fated version for DOS). By the time Visual Basic 6.0 was released in 1998, its dominance was absolute"

TBH, VB for DOS was indeed not very successful, and while fun as a concept (I've recently coded a Wordle-clone with it it), all things considered it's not very practical nor sensible.

I'm the last to defend visual programming, it's mostly spaghetti nonsense and you'd be better of with an actual programming language for most complexity levels -- but I think there's a viable niche for stuff that satisfies both of the following:

(a) it's simple and it strings together off-the-shelf components;

(b) it has an intuitive, well-defined computational model

examples: defining compositions of matrix transformations for camera angles, defining data pipelines (read from this source, do these operations, write to that sink), very simple automation Apple Shortcuts-style (whenever I receive a message from this number, make a note on this file, etc.)

As soon as you venture into general-purpose territory, visual programming is just a disaster. Which is a problem because you have no way to convert your mini-idea into something usable, and you always find yourself wishing you had started with a normal script.

I tend to stay very far away, but it does have its moments admittedly.