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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

#171

Post by jjkaczor »

simonh wrote: post #146
jjkaczor wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well - basically, if you wanted to become a fighter pilot and had VB1-6 experience and wanted the "RAD" forms tools, but also wanted true OOP, there was always... Delphi You could do pretty much anything with Delphi that you could do with C/C++ on Windows.

True, but that's also true of .NET

Correct - but Delphi was available in the VB3-4 timeframe, years ahead of .NET.

When .NET was in beta, I managed to participate through a Microsoft friend - and, saw that the writing-was-on-the-wall... I dropped my tentative exploration of Java (I had even become a Sun partner) and focussed all my efforts on C#, I could see that was the way forward (especially considering it was up for ECMA/ISO certification as well) and basically never touched VB.NET or VB again. (Outside of some VBA within Excel/Word/etc)

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

#172

Post by draw_down »

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…

[dead]

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

#173

Post by draw_down »

fjfaase wrote: post #134

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 mar…

I promise you this: nothing about working with COM induced feelings of “transparency” or ease.

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

#174

Post by runlaszlorun »

mhd wrote: post #79
throwawaaarrgh wrote: post #13

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.

> Nerds just can't wrap their heads around this idea: no normal person wants to be a programmer. 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 "professi…

Agreed. I’m working on something to try to get back to that. But I’ve been bumbling through so many diff ideas that who knows if it’ll ever see a launch, let alone adoption.

I think it’s fair to ask power users to come up a little to become a programmer, but then they get a much better system to their liking.

I feel like there’s so much unnecessary complexity these days in different JS frameworks, CSS approaches, build and dependency systems, etc.

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

#175

Post by mike_hearn »

narag wrote: post #66

I don't think Microsoft failed to see that most VB programmers wanted to keep VB as it was. Microsoft killed VB with a clear purpose: controlling more tightly as much as Windows development as possible, copying the Java model with .NET. If that seems like too conspiranoic theory, let's say that their new Devs head, Anders Hejlsberg, wanted a more uniform development experience around .NET and its star, C#. I'd bet fo…

It wasn't deliberately killed. The problem was that VB6 had weird semantics and behavior by the standards of other languages, but .NET was designed primarily around Java's semantics. Rather than pollute their nice next-gen platform (that they wanted to standardize through ECMA even!) with lots of VB6 compatibility goop, Microsoft chose to change VB with a new version that was closer to a normal .NET language. For example, in VB6 parameters are always passed by reference, but in C#, Java and VB.net they're passed by value.

They also didn't seem to care much about being fully compatible, for example VB6 had some fairly basic features that WinForms didn't have.

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

#176

Post by mike_hearn »

pavlov wrote: post #44
lukasb wrote: post #21

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

I have some experience here and can share my frustrations... I wrote the original version of a product named React Studio ( https://reactstudio.com ). It's sort of a "VB for the modern mobile-first web". Unlike VB though, it's runtimeless and exports regular React code (there's no closed blob or mandatory custom packages in the output). An enormous thing that has changed since the 1990s and those halcyon days of Visu…

You can also plot a middle path. JavaFX Scene Builder for example supports CSS, style sheets and custom themes, but also supports visual design and layout. However people with a graphics design background would still need to learn a bit of UI design like how to make responsive layouts, and they wouldn't be able to use Figma anymore. Animation also isn't that well supported. Still it can be done, it's mostly a case of investment.

The Jetpack Compose guys are trying to do it the other way around - generate layout code from Figma files.

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

#177

Post by snapcaster »

anthk wrote: post #160
cutler wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So how do you build a desktop database with a staff user interface for a small business running on a couple of Windows desktops?

Lazarus + SQLite. Problem solved.

Why won't you accept this isn't a workable solution for the vast majority of people? Comments like this give me a brief moment of wanting every engineer in tech (me included) to be laid off and replaced with excel people

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

#178

Post by runlaszlorun »

pif wrote: post #78
throwawaaarrgh wrote: post #13

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.

The problem arises when a clueless manager sees your tiny custom 50-line program and makes it responsible for anything more complex than a water dispenser, with the author and his boss praising the "simplicity" and "ease of development" of what is going to become the bane of the organization for the following decades. I do understand that most people don't want to be programmers, and that's fine. At the same time, pr…

Does this really happen often? I’m not saying it doesn’t, I’ve just heard the claim repeated often while never having seen it myself. Maybe because every project I’ve been on was far over-complicated rather under.

A small, crappy prototype would also go far in sussing out requirements. But I’ve generally not seen that included enough in the development process for most big corporate internet projects.

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

#180

Post by mike_hearn »

lukasb wrote: post #21

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

Beyond the other issues like styling, components were a big part of the VB experience and they had several features that the web hasn't been able to match:

1. They exposed metadata that let them be installed into visual designers and have their properties/events be controlled visually.

2. They could be compiled native code, which allowed people to integrate licensing and make a commercial marketplace for them.

3. They could be written in other languages like C++, allowing VB devs to rely on harder-core programmers to solve some gnarly library or algorithmic problem that was then exposed to them semi-visually.

The web has settled on React components for this but they don't satisfy any of those above features.

There's also a deployment issue. VB apps were "deployed" by just sending someone the EXE, or sticking it on a shared network drive, or maybe building an installer for them. There was absolutely no auto-update story whatsoever if you weren't using a Windows SMB mount which is why the web eventually displaced it, but it was really damn easy to get that first version to people, much easier than for a website (until PHP with shared web hosting got popular).

These days EXEs are much harder to make and send around due to safety features. There's code signing to contend with but also the expectation that you don't impose a choice of OS on users, maybe that you support mobile, that the app will update itself in case of bugs and so on. It's slowly coming back though. With Flutter you can make a mobile app using the app stores to do update, and then bring it to the desktop using Hydraulic Conveyor (my product) to do updates and packaging on the desktop with Codemagic or GitHub Actions to produce the binaries for each platform.

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