Any time VB comes up I repeat my same wishlist item. I would love for Microsoft to open source it, in any way, shape or form. I would love for the community to take a crack at adding things to VB6 like bugfixes, any missing features (my understanding is they don't own everything about VB6) and just overall general improvements, imagine VB6 with threading. I know its ancient, but it can still produce a native GUI appl…
How hard could it be to just clone it, at this point?
I'm writing a history of Visual Basic, Chapter 1 is up
41–50 of 101 posts
Re: I'm writing a history of Visual Basic, Chapter 1 is up
#42Why on earth would you use an AI-generated image [1] (let me be clear: POOR AI IMAGE) for the banner of this project? If you're going to use genai, you need to make sure it actually looks acceptable. Do at least one careful pass over it before publishing. Just look at the details: - The text on the book spines doesn’t even spell “Microsoft” correctly. - Dartmouth is spelled "Darmouth". SIGH. - The screenshot on the C…
Get used to it. This is the future we've created for ourselves. It's only going to get worse as people everywhere try to use AI to distinguish themselves. Expect everyone to be an artist, everyone to be an author, everyone to be a programmer. Slop. It's what's for dinner.
This is just lazy AI use as a replacement for lazy stock image use. The details of exactly how it sucks at its job while providing something that fills a checkbox for someone who has no concern for quality are somewhat different, but the basic failure is the same.
Re: I'm writing a history of Visual Basic, Chapter 1 is up
#43My very first purchase on eBay was to buy a used copy of Visual Basic 6 Enterprise Edition sometime while I was in school.
Then for a period of time I lost the physical CD it came with, and couldn’t install it anymore on a new system. Some time later I remember finding the CD at the bottom of some box of random stuff and being so happy - it was scratched up and didn’t reliably install, but I think I managed to burn a copy of it onto a new disk complete with inkjet printed sticky disk label that resembled the original disk.
Must had been mid/late 90s I think.
Had so much fun making stuff in VB back then.
Re: I'm writing a history of Visual Basic, Chapter 1 is up
#44Why on earth would you use an AI-generated image [1] (let me be clear: POOR AI IMAGE) for the banner of this project? If you're going to use genai, you need to make sure it actually looks acceptable. Do at least one careful pass over it before publishing. Just look at the details: - The text on the book spines doesn’t even spell “Microsoft” correctly. - Dartmouth is spelled "Darmouth". SIGH. - The screenshot on the C…
Thicc floppy disk.
The "Oomerd" button is probably the debugger by the sound of it?
Re: I'm writing a history of Visual Basic, Chapter 1 is up
#45Ah yes, Mcosoft ΓΛAX and Microsoft Marl. Groundbreaking products that paved the way for Visual Basic, Visual Studio, and beyond.
Unironically, yes, this, Ifsuѧl Bacti1on|, and weird computer shape (extra-thick 3.5"-looking floppy and... what that slot is even supposed to be?) makes it look worse than it should. I get that the value is in other content, and this is just a basic illustration for the sake of having some picture (for aesthetics, I guess?). So it was made with minimum effort possible just to have something, that's cool, effort matt…
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Re: I'm writing a history of Visual Basic, Chapter 1 is up
#46Any time VB comes up I repeat my same wishlist item. I would love for Microsoft to open source it, in any way, shape or form. I would love for the community to take a crack at adding things to VB6 like bugfixes, any missing features (my understanding is they don't own everything about VB6) and just overall general improvements, imagine VB6 with threading. I know its ancient, but it can still produce a native GUI appl…
How hard could it be to just clone it, at this point?
The point is that is was included in Windows.
Already enterprise approved on the MS stack.
I know HN is all startups with macbooks on local admin, but in bigger companies even devs cannot just install whatever they want.
Re: I'm writing a history of Visual Basic, Chapter 1 is up
#47I hope somebody writes a history of Visual FoxPro as well.
Or just plain FoxPro. I was writing dBase programs to put myself through undergrad in the late 1980s/early 1990s and I really liked the early DOS versions of FoxPro with their extensive mouse-driven TUI -- even more elaborate than the ones Borland had for their "Turbo" languages.
Re: I'm writing a history of Visual Basic, Chapter 1 is up
#48Related, very interesting and entertaining interview of Alan Cooper, including the story of him demo-ing ruby to Bill Gates
Re: I'm writing a history of Visual Basic, Chapter 1 is up
#49AI slop.
What's insufferably low effort banal human slop is your post, in stark contrast to the other posts written by actual human beings who cared enough to conscientiously put in the work to precisely and humorously criticize exactly what was lazy and careless and telling about that horrible illustration.
Next time you feel the urge to post "AI slop", why don't you take the trivial time and minuscule effort of actually copying and pasting the AI generated text and pictures into another LLM, and have it slop out a more interesting comment about HOW and WHY it's AI slop, instead of just posting your human slop that's not even good enough to be a prompt.
When you can't write anything more interesting than an LLM easily could, you have not earned the right to create a throw-away account just to complain "AI slop", and you should just sit on your hands (however many fingers they have) and not post anything.
Re: I'm writing a history of Visual Basic, Chapter 1 is up
#50Earlier quoted context omitted.
The problem isn’t the use of AI. It’s the lack of editorial effort to use AI well . Modern image generation models can handle text fine. Or the author could have left those artefacts blank and added the text themselves in “post production”
The problem is the use of AI. It’s a reliable indicator that the author doesn’t actually care about the quality of the work, so I shouldn’t bother to read the text.
Using AI to generate an image isn’t any different to embedding a generated meme or grabbing a stock photo.
Plus the image isn’t even part of the article content. It’s ostensibly just a front cover to it.
I’m sure you’ve heard the saying “don’t judge a book by its cover” ;)