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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

#251

Post by RyLuke »

sasulzer wrote: post #244
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/CL…

Hey Stephen, I wrote the original article. Had no idea that MS actually tried to port the Ruby forms engine to the CLR—what a fun twist. Did it end up being too difficult technically, or were there other factors that killed it?

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

#252

Post by lproven »

nereye wrote: post #226
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…

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'...

> The other competitor was Borland Paradox.

Yes, true. I was never a database guy but my impression at the time was that this was more of a capable tool for pros who wanted to do machine-local standalone stuff, whereas Approach won reviews and tests for ease of use.

OTOH saying that I've seen amateurs do amazing stuff with Access by trial and error....

> IIRC there is an easter egg in Microsoft Access [...] > a cirrus and a 'pair of ducks'...

:-o That is harsh!

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

#253

Post by fuzzfactor »

namaria wrote: post #170
cmiles74 wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nothing is wrong with bus drivers! :-) I'm not sure comparing software developers to bus drivers is a metaphor that gets us very far... In fact, why some bus drivers might want to really be flying fighter jets also had me scratching my head.

More like bus drivers wanting to become heavy machinery operators...

Kind of like the loads of everyday bus drivers safely carrying many more users around, compared to the uncommon fighter pilot doing risky things very few users will need to do.

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

#254

Post by bazoom42 »

narag wrote: post #246
bazoom42 wrote: post #234

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

So .net was a deliberate ruse to trick Borland into delivering a sub-par product?

It’s weird because a very common complaint towards .net was that it didn’t allow you to build self-contained stand-alone applications the way VB6 and Delphi allowed. So possibly Borland could have attracted a lot of disgruntled VB6 developer who migt have found Delphi more familiar than VB.net.

> 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.

Given the the dominace of Windows was because of the available software (and Microsofts dedication to backwards combatibility was legendary) I dont see why anybody would belive that.

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

#255

Post by CharlesW »

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…

> Everything you sort of imagine Apple would be to work at was true on that team, and has never actually been the case at Apple.

I'm glad to hear your Microsoft experience was amazing. But as someone who worked at Apple during that time, this assertion is untrue and seems unnecessarily mean-spirited.

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

#256

Post by follower »

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.…

One of the leading contenders for being a modern equivalent IMO would be the Godot game engine.

The Godot editor is less than 100MB to download for many platforms--the recent Godot 4 release also supports running the editor on the web[0] and on Android.

Its packaging/distribution story for GUI-based applications is easier & stronger than any other modern programming environment of which I'm aware--in a large part due to the (IMO inspired) architecture of using per-platform pre-built application templates/shells paired with per-project "data" files that contain assets & script byte code.

Godot's modularity, ease of development & distribution has led to it being adopted for non-game applications too: "Apps & Tools - 2022 Showreel" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9kKp0oguzr8>

I do think the initial "complexity of the programming" for an absolute beginner is probably still at least a little bit higher than drag-and-drop GUI environments like classic VB, REALbasic, VBA or Hypercard. (Primarily from a UI/UX point of view because Godot doesn't directly have the "drag button from toolbar" workflow which I think was key in earlier systems. But it is extremely modular by way of configuration & extension--one intended use case being e.g. specialized feature-subsetted tools for artists.)

In my experience it also works really well for iterative development where you can just hack around (from visual & code perspectives) to get something working & then refine it (and using Godot's "Scenes" paradigm for encapsulation).

Anyway, you might like to consider suggesting Godot next time you're riding in a cab & discover that the driver is a beginner who would like to learn. :)

[0] https://editor.godotengine.org/releases/4.0.stable/godot.edi...>

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

#257

Post by sasulzer »

RyLuke wrote: post #251
sasulzer wrote: post #244

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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/CL…

Hey Stephen, I wrote the original article. Had no idea that MS actually tried to port the Ruby forms engine to the CLR—what a fun twist. Did it end up being too difficult technically, or were there other factors that killed it?

We kept the Ruby forms engine as unmanaged code written in C/Win32/COM and tried to integrate it with Basic code compiled and running on the CLR, but it didn't work very well. There were a lot of problems back then (this was 25 years ago now, a couple years before .NET 1.0 shipped) with CLR/COM interop. One particular problem I recall was that the interop layer did not support calling event handlers via IDispatch which the Ruby forms engine required.

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

#258

Post by st00 »

svachalek wrote: post #213
tarasglek wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 t…

Would Glitch be a modern equivalent? https://glitch.com/

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

#259

Post by anildash »

st00 wrote: post #258
svachalek wrote: post #213

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 t…

Would Glitch be a modern equivalent? https://glitch.com/

We definitely took inspiration from Visual Basic, and Alan Cooper has been an advisor and influence from the start for us.
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