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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

#131

Post by mysterydip »

Stratoscope wrote: post #4

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…

VB was my swiss army knife for many years, making utilities for solving organization's pain points, some of which were used unchanged for over a decade. I even made some games in it back in the day!

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

#132

Post by rprospero »

wslh wrote: post #73

As a system programmer who used VB6 as a glue or ochestrator (early 2000s) of low level components I say the only important flaw I found was on its single threading model. 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.

I also remember my dismissive high school analysis of VB and wouldn't mind an opportunity to slap my younger self for blind dogmatism. However, I also remember that the fight was a two way street. My high school had classes in both VB and C++ and there were multiple calls from the local business community to cancel the C++ class. There was no reason to teach a dead language when knowledge of VB was enough for a lifetime career. Especially with the emerging web, where companies would need a ready supply of VB script developers and ActiveX control creators for their sites (JavaScript would be deprecated once the last five people using Netscape came to their senses).

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

#133

Post by timw4mail »

clouddrover wrote: post #32
kome wrote: post #22

What are some contemporary clones of VB6, still maintained and useful?

Delphi: https://www.embarcadero.com/products/delphi Lazarus: https://www.lazarus-ide.org/

Lazarus looks so promising...but their documentation is so scattershot.

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

#134

Post by fjfaase »

VB6 is often underrated as a programming language, but it did have some neat things that are still not present in existing programming languages. (They were dropped in VB.NET.) In a sense VB6 is still ahead of its time.

One is the transparent intergration with COM objects, allowing you to access objects in another process (possibly from a different executable) in exactly the same way as in-process object. All the marshalling is done under the hood. The only problem with this is that the execution of a single statement could be intermixed with another statement in another thread. I once had to deal with a nasty bug that was obscured by this fact, which was actually caused by using a programming mistake where someone had used a global variable for something that should have been a method argument.

The other is the very nice event mechanism where there is no need to (un)register event handlers. They are automatically registered and unregistered. Very powerful mechanism that I started to use more and more the longer I worked with VB6.

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

#135

Post by pcdoodle »

Bus driver moment:

As a young contractor I was told about an on premies lawn mower kept getting stolen. I asked if there was a telephone line down in that part of the buiding. Wrote them a vb6 app that monitored a magnetic door contact sensor on the LPT Printer port with a vb6 timer that looked for a state change and would send AT commands to the modem to call the on site manager if the door with the equipment was opened during a non standard time. Took a few minutes to do this in vb6 and clients were super happy.

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

#136

Post by [deleted] »

interfixus wrote: post #87
pjc50 wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the implication was that his radical puritanism left him unemployable except as a literal bus driver.

Very droll, but incorrect. Also, I believe the word you're looking for is purism . I'll certainly go along with that. Also also, out of curiosity, where did you dredge up the "he"?

[deleted]

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

#137

Post by pcdoodle »

djhworld wrote: post #64

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…

Remember being able to pause execution, check variables by hovering, changing the dang code and resuming like nothing happended?

"Do you ever wish a = 2 and not 3? introducing, pause button, let's you add anything at anytime and we don't ask no questions!"

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

#138

Post by bena »

deafpolygon wrote: post #55
Pamar wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sorta like Excel, then?

And Access! That's one amazing piece of software.

No. Fuck Access. Access is a useless piece of software that serves no purpose well.

Either your data is small enough to be managed by Excel or your data is complex enough to be better served by a database and frontend.

Dealing with the idiosyncrasies of Access is never worth it.

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

#139

Post by pcdoodle »

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…

Xojo is another one worth looking at. Desktop and Web apps can be written pretty quick.

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

#140

Post by specproc »

I can remember doing stuff in VB when I must have been 14 or so. Coming to it from QBASIC it felt incredibly powerful and incredibly complicated.

I think I managed to cobble together a simple form that informed the user the computer had a "virus", made it up as an .exe, and stuck it on a timer on the family computer for shits and giggles.

Good times.

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