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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

#221

Post by snapcaster »

bena wrote: post #191
snapcaster wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You understand that the people who are making Excel and Access apps aren't professional software developers right?

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

#222

Post by Stratoscope »

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…

Just a note of thanks to everyone who has replied. I thanked one or two of you individually, but I don't want to clutter up the thread too much.

Your kind words mean a lot to me, but more importantly, thank you all for the great things you built using VB.

And if you liked VB, you should definitely check out Retool!

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

#224

Post by deafpolygon »

bena wrote: post #138
deafpolygon wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

If you have a spreadsheet on a share that you'd like multiple people to have concurrent access to, Excel is not the way to go (until now; nowadays you can just put it on OneDrive and add access). Access was perfect for that kind of configuration for a small office that you could customize a small database without being a DBA.

I use it for a few hobby things and it's fun. Drag and drop a few things in a form, add a couple fields and you're good to go! Sure beats having to write SQL by hand and a few hundred lines of Python to interface with it; and that's before you write the UI for it.

I wish MS would spend a little bit of that R&D budget to improve on it some more, and expand its capability. But that'd cannibalize their other products, likely. It's too niche nowadays.

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

#225

Post by orthoxerox »

richsu-ca wrote: post #211

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

Bruce's Hardcore VB was the first book that I was underqualified to read as a teenager teaching himself to program.

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

#226

Post by nereye »

lproven wrote: post #111
deafpolygon wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is true. People don't understand that there is an upper limit to Access before you run into issues - but it's fairly large.. what was it? 4GB? Edit: 2gb!

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…

The other competitor was Borland Paradox.

IIRC there is an easter egg in Microsoft Access 1.0 where the About box changes to an animation of a pond with two ducks in it that are then hit by lightning from a cloud above. I.e. a cirrus and a 'pair of ducks'...

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

#227

Post by jkingsbery »

When I started to learn programming in the mid-90s, it was still common to not have home Internet (or, if you did, it was too expensive to spend the whole day online). I learned a lot of programming from the VB helpfiles, a random book on VB from Barnes and Nobles, and recording VB macros in Excel and frankenstein-ing them back together to do different things. In particular, learning from recording macros and seeing the command was a very intuitive way to learn - I didn't have to guess at what the first version of a program would do.

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

#228

Post by sigmonsays »

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…

i recall around the time windows released transparent windows API calls. I promptly wired them up into a VB6 app and could make any window I wanted transparent.

VB6 Rocked.

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

#229

Post by WillAdams »

Stratoscope wrote: post #214
WillAdams wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 "Visua…

Thanks!

Did HP coming out with NewWave and its scripting language influence this at all?

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

#230

Post by orthoxerox »

jjkaczor wrote: post #130
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…

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.

It's not a coincidence that Microsoft poached Anders Hejlsberg, the creator of Delphi, to work on C# and .NET.
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