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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

#201

Post by mike_hearn »

mwcampbell wrote: post #197
mike_hearn wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yeah, once data files, OCX controls and more got involved you had to build an installer and Microsoft didn't provide any solutions for that until MSI came along. And InstallShield was expensive. So that hurt VB just as people were moving towards the web where you didn't have any dependency issues like that (assuming all the servers were online).

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

#202

Post by TedDoesntTalk »

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

It is not true that you could do everything in early .NET that you could do with Win32. Not all Win32 functions were exposed in .NET

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

#203

Post by bazoom42 »

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…

The problem wasn’t they added more advanced features to the language, the problem was they changed the whole development environment in a backwards-incompatible way.

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

#204

Post by 2-718-281-828 »

HeyLaughingBoy wrote: post #195
nevertoolate wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I actually watched it already and in the theater at that. the last movie where adam driver doesn't come across a subtle prick.

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

#205

Post by gladiatr72 »

alxlaz wrote: post #83
pif wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd say that Microsoft heard the voices of the poor souls that had to convert the buggy code from the idiots into usable applications.

Or: Microsoft heard the voices of the entitled souls who looked at working applications and thought they were bad because they weren't DRY enough or something. That's how we ended up with CRUD apps that are practically indistinguishable from their Visual Basic 6 predecessors, except they're deployed on k8s clusters instead of a 133 MHz Pentium in the corner.

I haven't done it yet, but I have a kubernetes t-shirt idea that would involve the line: Kubernetes! solving yesterday's problems again, today!

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

#206

Post by EdiX »

AnIdiotOnTheNet wrote: post #142
hahamrfunnyguy wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the WYSIWYG WPF and Silverlight tools were pretty close to VB6 level of usability. The tools are great for building a quick UI, but I think they fall short for more complex applications. This is why designers have their own preferences when it comes to designing the UX, to give them the flexibility to create the UI as they see fit. When different teams are working on a shared goal, there can always an element…

I would argue that "more complex applications", when it comes to UI, are an anti-pattern. Use standard widgets, and don't be creative. Of course "standard widgets" don't really exist anymore because of where UI design has gone, but they did provide a consistency that users could rely on. That is gone now. Buttons don't even look like buttons anymore.

The GUI builder of VB6 fell apart the moment you wanted to do a resizable window. Here "more complex applications" = "window that you can resize or maximize".

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

#207

Post by starik36 »

TedDoesntTalk wrote: post #202
simonh wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

True, but that's also true of .NET

It is not true that you could do everything in early .NET that you could do with Win32. Not all Win32 functions were exposed in .NET

You could always PInvoke into any Win32 function. There was/is even a website to help you with a declaration. https://www.pinvoke.net/

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

#208

Post by ChicagoDave »

I’m fairly certain that the only way to originally purchase VB 1.0 was an 800 number posted in Dvorak’s weekly PC Info magazine column. It was $99 and I borrowed it from my manager. I still have the original manuals and 3.5” disks.

It was almost like Microsoft was sheepishly waving it and saying, “maybe you’ll think this is cool,” while not directly challenging their C++ audience.

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

#210

Post by yCombLinks »

est wrote: post #40
lukasb wrote: post #21

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

The web is a mess compared to text/binary data we had to deal with in the 90s and early 00s. Personal Computers used to be a productivity oriented tool. VB6 was designed to handle business data. Today mobile phones are like sentiment manipulation devices or consumerism sinkhole. Could iPhone owners created apps on their iPhones? No. It's a ready-only OS.

Yeah, but I can't even write a standard desktop GUI app nearly as easily as 25 years ago. Even a desktop first web app should be simple
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