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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

#191

Post by bena »

snapcaster wrote: post #177
anthk wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Why isn't it?

If your situation has reached the point where Excel is no longer a workable solution, you need a full application. I've never seen an Access application that didn't grow to a point where it wasn't a glitchy mess requiring a rewrite as a full stand-alone application. So you might as well skip that step and go straight to the stand-alone application.

It's an unnecessary bridge.

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

#192

Post by namaria »

AnIdiotOnTheNet wrote: post #144
kitd wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Excel is another amazing piece of software, that is almost universally looked down upon by programmers. I read somewhere that there are 10 x more Excel "programmers" in the world than programmers for all other languages put together.

I would not be surprised. I have said before that Excel is the most widely used programming environment in history and will continue to be so for the foreseeable future, and it is all precisely because it provides users an on-ramp to programming in a domain where it is sorely needed.

Whenever I hear someone hyping up some lowcode/nocode thing or asking about it, I point them to Excel and Access and say "that concept is older then Python, and it's not going anywhere".

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

#193

Post by namaria »

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 don't everyone drive the same car as me? Dress the same as me? Read the same books, watch the same series, talk to the same people? It's clearly working great for me! Buncha rubes!"

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

#194

Post by lproven »

jjkaczor wrote: post #157
lproven wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's worse than that. The thing that imposes these limitations is the somewhat primitive DB engine for Access, which is codenamed MS Jet: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Access_Database_Engine But the big that MS & MS fans don't like to mention is that MS Exchange Server uses a version of the same storage engine . It's not mentioned even once in these Wikipedia articles, for instance, but if you look, you will find tel…

Sigh - don't get me started on Jet engine DB corruption... You wink at it, over a network with more than a single user - and you have a chance of corruption...

Exactly!

(I was a certified Exchange admin, in the 1990s, and have cleaned up several big corporate systems that collapsed.)

It is not the tool you want for business-critical shared network data stores.

And yet, the pairing of Exchange and Outlook is THE MS critical tool that's won them a million corporate accounts.

That's a million corporates, of course. Not seats. Hundreds of millions of seats.

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

#195

Post by HeyLaughingBoy »

nevertoolate wrote: post #105
2-718-281-828 wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Public transportation? I'm curious probably because I do consider switching careers. Bus driving - in my fantasy - provides some of the features I sort of desire (clear schedule, clear expectations) while lacking those I annoy (further educating outside of work, tendency to take problems home with you). What's your situation?

I recommend watching the film Paterson, with Adam Driver (a bus driver in the film)

As do I, for reasons that have nothing to do with this thread. It's just a great film.

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

#196

Post by lappet »

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…

whoa, I made a fake virus too! Mine would freeze the user's screen, and display a progress bar that their hard disk was being deleted. I shared it on download.com and got a few thousand downloads. VB6 was so much fun as a teenager. If you all know anything that is close to it please let me know!

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

#197

Post by mwcampbell »

mike_hearn wrote: post #180
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. The…

My recollection is that VB6 deployment got messy when you started stringing together lots of third-party components, since they had to be installed and registered system-wide. Windows XP introduced registration-free COM through SxS manifests, but a lot of us couldn't use that for years after XP came out, because we had to keep supporting 9x and maybe 2000.

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

#198

Post by jlarocco »

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've had good luck using Python with COM. It has some rough edges, but it works well enough, and can even tab complete methods and accessors in the REPL.

Here's an old example working with Catia: https://gist.github.com/jl2/2704426

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

#199

Post by DeathArrow »

lproven wrote: post #161
DeathArrow wrote: post #99

Ideally we should have a modern programming language and environment that a) is very easy to use for new comers and people that aren't professionals to build small functionalities and link different functionalities together b) has visual components (so this disqualifies Python) c) it is flexible and can be used by seasoned professionals to build complex things The complexity of the programming should be gradual, i.e.…

I think you're right. And there were things in this general direction... Smalltalk and Logo spring to mind. But there is a lot of culture in computing, and a big problem that isn't recognised let along acknowledged is that today, there are basically only 2 surviving branches on one tree, when 30-40 years ago there was a whole forest. The branches are Windows (which now means NT) and Unix (which now means Linux and ma…

>But there is a lot of culture in computing, and a big problem that isn't recognised let along acknowledged is that today, there are basically only 2 surviving branches on one tree, when 30-40 years ago there was a whole forest.

I guess 30-40 years ago computing was much newer, there was a lot more enthusiasm and people were willing to try many new things and do things in many different way. At a conceptual level, Go isn't very different from Java which isn't very different from Python. LISP is quite different from Smalltalk and Smalltalk is quite different from ML and ML is quite different from Prolog.

As for small, home operating systems, BeOS was quite different from both Mac and Windows. :)

> Suggest that, hey, let's run Smalltalk on the bare metal and teach kids on that, so that they don't even have to ever know what "a file" is or means, and people will say "that's crazy talk!"

A file is just an abstraction, and so are Unix pipes. I don't see while there can't be other valid concepts to hold data than files.

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

#200

Post by hnthrowaway0315 »

illiarian wrote: post #31
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…

> visual programming has never taken off, despite countless attempts over the past few decades. It has, in some niches like Unreal Blueprints. I think one of the reasons it doesn't become more popular is because most visual programming is just a more cumbersome and slow way of programming. It's stringing the same concepts together in the same way, but slowly and tediously with a mouse. Non-tech users wouldn't know wh…

BP is the only reason I don't want to play with UE. It's too painful IMHO. I wish we had Unrealscript.
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