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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

#241

Post by mappu »

Stratoscope wrote: post #219
illiarian wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 ke…

> You would right-click a gizmo, select an event, drag a line over to the target gizmo and select a property.

This idea lives on in Qt Creator - https://doc.qt.io/qt-6/designer-connection-mode.html although I think most larger apps write their `connect()` calls in code instead.

Was it kind-of like this?

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

#242

Post by mappu »

EdiX wrote: post #206
AnIdiotOnTheNet wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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".

VB.NET/WinForms (and competitors like Qt Designer) had a pretty good solution for widget placement on resize, all within the GUI builder. So i don't think this was fatal, if Classic VB had survived a bit longer it likely would have been added too.

(Although to date they don't have a great solution for responsive layouts.)

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

#243

Post by fatneckbeard »

dgb23 wrote: post #69
m_mueller wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wouldn't say it didn't take off, it just has 'landed' again somewhere over the last 10-20 years. VB, Xcode Interface Builder, Hypercard, Filemaker & Lotus Notes all had pretty good runs, we just never got something similarly successful for the web & even smartphones, probably due to compatibility issues with varying screen sizes. Once the screen can be wildly resized, it just becomes too murky. Maybe have the progr…

People still use VB and Filemaker to make applications along with very complex Excel spreadsheets. It’s way more common than the general sentiment here implies. In fact, I get handed stuff made with tools like these somewhat regularly in order to develop a web app. At some point they become unwieldy and limiting. I think it’s wonderful that anyone with some technical curiosity can make useful applications with these.…

yup its like two different worlds that don't know each other exist

the excel tribe and the open source programming world tribe

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

#244

Post by sasulzer »

tomcam wrote: post #27

Was a huge fan of the product. Joined the VB team as a PM in 1996 and worked for a few years while my health declined. The whole division was beautifully run. The people were, to a person, amazing human beings. I honestly think I stumbled into the best team Microsoft had before or since. The Microsoft campus was verdant and tranquil. Everything you sort of imagine Apple would be to work at was true on that team, and…

I joined the VB/Ruby dev team in 1992, first as an intern and then full-time a couple years later and stayed in the team thru 1999 / VB6. I implemented the Data control and some of the data binding logic for VB 3.0. It was such a special team and code base - even 30 years later I still fondly remember my HDesks, HDeskrefs, and Gizmos. We tried hard to get the Ruby forms engine running on the (what became the) .NET/CLR runtime - but alas it was not to be.

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

#245

Post by MrJohz »

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 mean, the notepad method still works, and there's nothing stopping you from going down that route. Hell, you can probably make it easier: open up a browser on any page, open up the inspector console, and you've got a REPL and semi-visual environment right there at your fingertips. A combination of that and using notepad to "save" your progress would probably be a pretty potent learning tool.

I don't really know what your point here is. Professionals use different tools to beginners to program? Yes, obviously this is the case. I started making videos with Windows MovieMaker, but that is unlikely to be the favoured tool when editing together a Marvel blockbuster. But you can learn a lot just by using more simple tools and then graduating to the more complicated ones when you find you need them.

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

#246

Post by narag »

bazoom42 wrote: post #234
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…

I dont see how .net was more tightly controlled than VB? VB was a closed source proprietary language tightly integrated with the IDE. They had absolute control.

They had no control over other vendors' programming tools. Borland Delphi used a more difficult language, but generated compiled, autocontained faster binaries, had a better out of the box library, similar third party components market (same language for programs and libraries, unlike VB that often used C++ controls) and was starting to develop a version for Linux.

Microsoft had been poaching most of Borland's talent:

https://techmonitor.ai/technology/microsoft_and_borland_bury...

That included Hejlsberg. Take a look at the tools he created and worked on:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anders_Hejlsberg

Later something interesting happened. Microsoft settled just another suit, this time for office applications. I don't remember if it was a spreadsheet or a desktop database and I've been unable to find it in the news, but I clearly remember that Borland received $30M in cash and priviledged access to Microsoft's dev documentation.

Then Borland abandoned Kylix, its Delphi version for Linux and released Delphi 8, that wasn't a native tool, but only worked on .NET. Next versions of Delphi included both .NET and native compilers and .NET creeped into Delphi IDE making it much slower. FUD was spreaded that Microsoft will eventually close all native developement and you will only will be able to use .NET to program for Windows.

Delphi versions for .NET were never as good as VS, always lagging in features, and finally they were abandoned. But the distraction lasted long enough to kill the company.

It's not the same to target a binary API and a virtual machine. The first must be stable, backwards compatible and follow specifications.

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

#247

Post by pjmlp »

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…

Besides all sibling comments, OutSystems is doing quite well for the last 20 years.

Just like most low code, CDP and data analytics tooling.

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

#248

Post by pjmlp »

teh_klev wrote: post #167
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…

> One is the transparent intergration with COM I think this is one of the things detractors of VB kinda miss. You could build quite sophisticated software to leverage COM/DCOM without needing to go full C/C++ and IDL. The place I worked at built software that ran inside Microsoft Transaction Server (latterly COM+) to exploit distributed transactions. And then there's the really "advanced" stuff you could do in VB as…

It is incredible how on one hand WinDev has doubled down on COM after the way Longhorn was botched and rebooted into Vista,coming up with WinRT afterwards.

While on the other hand they keep failing to deliver a VB like experience to deal with all that COM.

All C++ improvements were killed in the name of the mighty IDL, and even .NET has always been hit and miss with RCW/CCW, and CsWinRT requires manual boilerplate coding.

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

#249

Post by pjmlp »

mike_hearn wrote: post #124
m_mueller wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wouldn't say it didn't take off, it just has 'landed' again somewhere over the last 10-20 years. VB, Xcode Interface Builder, Hypercard, Filemaker & Lotus Notes all had pretty good runs, we just never got something similarly successful for the web & even smartphones, probably due to compatibility issues with varying screen sizes. Once the screen can be wildly resized, it just becomes too murky. Maybe have the progr…

The problem isn't responsive design, GUI builders were able to do that just fine. The problem with making it work on the web was that the dominant design paradigm for web apps was (and to some extent still is) templating, in which there's no clean split between UI layout code and UI controller code and no proper notion of encapsulated components. PHP, JSP, ASP and the tag all mix UI layout with code that works with t…

VB did it via VBScript and COM, later with Web Forms in .NET.

Outsystems picked up on this and created a visual programming language for the Web, still going strong 20 years later.

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