Loved the article. Thank you.
I went from VB6 to C#, and lived through the drama surrounding the end of VB6. Everyone one had something to say, but here are some words from Bruce McKinney https://classicvb.net/hardweb/mckinney.htm
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
#212VB6 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…
The integrated debugger was also excellent. Outside of Lisp, few languages have decent support for Edit and Continue.
https://blog.codinghorror.com/edit-and-continue/
I think Java and .Net are pretty close. It is utterly shameful that languages like Python and JavaScript consider themselves to be developer friendly when their debuggers still require full reloads whenever the local state gets modified in place. Common Lisp had Edit and Continue (equivalent functionality in their debugger) before the dotcom crisis.
Vercel and Microsoft product managers, if you are reading this, please implement this feature in Next.js, VS Code, and Typescript.
Re: Something Pretty Right: The History and Legacy of Visual Basic
#213Ryan 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…
Hey, I got started programming in VB3! Thank you for your involvement in forming my expectations of programming. I feel like my path was so much better because I started from laying out a UI and then learning code as a way to make it do stuff instead of the "lets learn complicated goop with no clear purpose first". To this day I'm amazed by how ok devs are with not being able to get instant satisfaction from achievin…
Today's equivalent would be an IDE that you hit "new project" and type a few lines and draw a few boxes and you've got something up and running in the cloud. There's nothing like it as far as I know; there's an entire generation or more who have never seen programming work like that, and don't even envision it, it seems. Bold ambitions these days usually amount to a clone of a popular thing, with some kind of tweak that's interesting but not nearly interesting enough to get people to move.
Re: Something Pretty Right: The History and Legacy of Visual Basic
#214Ryan 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…
Were you aware of how MS killed off the competing MacBASIC? Did you ever see the sourcecode for it? How would you tell the VisualBASIC side of this story: https://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?story=MacBasic.txt&cha...
I hadn't seen that story before, thanks for pointing to it. Lots of great stories on folklore.org! I recommend it to anyone interested in the early days of Macintosh.
I don't think there is a Visual Basic side to the story. Our work was many years after those sorry events.
In fact I never saw the source code for any of the Apple or Microsoft Basics, not even the "Basic" side of Visual Basic. Our team built the "Visual" side of it, code named Ruby. (No relation to the programming language.)
Originally Ruby wasn't going to be combined with Basic at all. It was going to be a user-customizable shell for Windows 3.0. Instead of Program Manager and File Manager, you could create your own desktop with things you wanted on it.
Ruby had a very primitive scripting language, but the language API was designed to allow other interpreters to be plugged into it.
Microsoft later decided to scrap the "shell" idea and create Visual Basic instead.
Re: Something Pretty Right: The History and Legacy of Visual Basic
#215You 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.
Sorta like Excel, then?
Exactly like Excel! Both tools designed to let regular people achieve superhuman feats of computing without changing careers.
Re: Something Pretty Right: The History and Legacy of Visual Basic
#216I got started with Visual Basic 2.0
I wrote a shareware game in VB3 in the early 1990's called "Nisus Missile Master", a Missile Command clone.
If I remember correctly, I sold just over 400 copies.
My game made it into "Shareware Magazine" (print). I was also interviewed by the author of "Programming Games For Beginners" by Chris Howard, a chapter about Missile Master, and shareware sales.
You can find and play it here, but the emulator is very slow.
Re: 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
#218Ryan 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…
I always loved VB. Super useful for banging together a quick "enter a value in a text box and click a button to do something in the database" utility.
And VBX was a pain, but had some advantages over the COM-based controls. My first job at MSFT in 1994 was to build demonstration apps for interactive TV. When I started there was already a base application in VB3. I needed to add transparently layered images and text with rotation and animated transitions, and a windowless VBX made it easy to build that transparency. IIRC, you could not make windowless OCX controls. I'm not even sure how you'd do independently positioned transparent controls in VB4+.
Re: Something Pretty Right: The History and Legacy of Visual Basic
#219It 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…
Originally Ruby had a Blueprints-like UI to connect an event fired by one gizmo to a property of another gizmo. You would right-click a gizmo, select an event, drag a line over to the target gizmo and select a property.
In fact when Ryan first contacted me about the article, he was looking for a screenshot of this UI. Alas, I didn't have anything.
When Microsoft turned Ruby into VB, they abandoned this UI and just kept the form designer with Basic as a scripting language.
Re: Something Pretty Right: The History and Legacy of Visual Basic
#220When I was younger, I HATED VB6. Even today, I still loathe some of the weird apps that I had to support running in Excel with VBA. I truly never thought about the power of VB until I read this article - those apps I loathed so much probably wouldn't have existed if it weren't for VB. I ran into so many tools that provided immediate value and go things done, even if it was dodgy or weird. Even though I'm a Platform E…
"Alas, the final product horrified Cooper—who loathed BASIC"
This so reminded me of that wolf-to-dog "What could go wrong" meme.