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I'm writing a history of Visual Basic, Chapter 1 is up

evilgeniuslabs.ca

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Re: I'm writing a history of Visual Basic, Chapter 1 is up

#71

Post by CWuestefeld »

dingaling wrote: post #70
CWuestefeld wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've seen that, but always assumed it would be a more accessible account, and not tickle the technical developer itch. I recently read Jordan Mechner's The Making of Prince of Persia , and while it was interesting, it wasn't what I'd hoped for. It was a biography covering his life during the creation of the game, and very little about the internals and technology of it. That's fine, but for my tastes, the book that i…

Extrapolating from a single datum is worse than AI hallucinations. It's $4, the reviews are good, just buy it.

Speaking of single datum...

> It's $4, the reviews are good, just buy it.

Yeah, $4 isn't relevant. What is relevant is the time investment, which your response ignores.

Re: I'm writing a history of Visual Basic, Chapter 1 is up

#72

Post by CWuestefeld »

DonHopkins wrote: post #51

What I find fascinating (and have posted about in the past) is the story of how 16-bit Visual Basic VBX's became a success disaster, growing out of Microsoft's ongoing programming language wars, during the migration from Win16=>Win32, leading to the wildly successful yet disastrous COM/OLE/MFC/OCX/DCOM/ActiveX/ATL ecosystem, with its influence on COM-clones like mTropolis plug-ins, Macromedia MOA, Qt KParts, OpenOffi…

So they brewed up a bunch of ugly C macrology that enabled C programmers (or Visual Studio wizards) to define COM interfaces in header and implementation files that just happened to lay out memory in the exact same way as vtables of C++ pure virtual classes.

While C++ programs would use other ugly macros to declare actual honest-for-god C++ classes to implement COM interfaces.

And Visual Basic programmers would ... do whatever it was that Visual Basic programmers did.

We were being a well-behaved MS shop at this point. The new generation of our website was designed with a distributed component architecture being called from ASP (Active Server Pages) using DCOM. We implemented it in C++ using ATL (iirc) to facilitate the COM interfaces. The thing was, even with that help, our actual business logic was absolutely overwhelmed by all the annoying casting back-and-forth between those IUnknown values and C++ native types. It was really annoying.

This was around the timeframe of VB 5, I think, and we discovered that we could write the same logic in VB without all the annoyance. Putting aside our "serious developer" C++ elitism, we were actually productive in doing it all in VB instead of C++, and that generation of the system lasted for a bunch of years. We eventually replaced that with an ASP.Net design in C#, which was a whole lot more manageable.

Re: I'm writing a history of Visual Basic, Chapter 1 is up

#73

Post by Scroll_Swe »

CWuestefeld wrote: post #59
Scroll_Swe wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

VB was never included in Windows (although it did include the runtime files). Windows did include other BASIC-related stuff, like GW-BASIC, QBasic, and VBScript.

Yes, not to program it but to run. But that makes the IDE and such an easy approval for management and IT to push out/install.

Also batch. aaah, I love cmd.

Re: I'm writing a history of Visual Basic, Chapter 1 is up

#74

Post by dave8088 »

MBCook wrote: post #18

This sounds great but I’m genuinely unable to figure out how to get to part one. Not the thumbnail. Not the pink text “A History of Visusl Basic”. Not the number one on the list of chapters. Not the chapter ousted at the very bottom. The next button is for a different article. How am I supposed to navigate to the thing the article is advertising to me? It’s a very strange decision not to make it really easy with a st…

It’s like this site is competing for a prize that rewards the best visuals and the worst user experience. There are lessons be learned here.

Re: I'm writing a history of Visual Basic, Chapter 1 is up

#75

Post by NetMageSCW »

jhbadger wrote: post #47
zerr wrote: post #34

I 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.

I’d much rather read a history of Paradox.

Re: I'm writing a history of Visual Basic, Chapter 1 is up

#76

Post by NetMageSCW »

smackeyacky wrote: post #19
SilentM68 wrote: post #17

Excellent Idea :) VB was practical and useful at the time, especially as a learning tool in school. I enjoyed testing the competitors that arose to emulate its abilities, including RapidQ Basic, Envelope Basic (a.k.a Phoenix Object Basic), some of which are documented here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BASIC I think it would be cool to see a Documentary on programming languages, e.g. their history, rivalries, succes…

There is definitely a story to be told in GUI based development environments, from VisualWorks / Digitalk smalltalk to VB to Delphi. Along with the also rans (PowerBuilder, the death of Clipper and dBase systems). GUI interfaces were going to be a massive productivity goldmine compared to green screens and TUI interfaces. Now here we are back to those again in various forms and web browsers won in the end anyway. Was…

Still have h floppies for Digitalk Smalltalk/V in my office at work.

Re: I'm writing a history of Visual Basic, Chapter 1 is up

#77

Post by bigtech »

vunderba wrote: post #68
bigtech wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not that the author needs my defense, but that image says to me, 'hey, I'm just a guy who wrote a book and there's no budget for art' -- which fits a DIY aesthetic in 2026

Not to me it doesn't, to me it says, "Hey I couldn't be bothered to put in the bare minimum of effort to look over an image that is going to be the LITERAL face of my upcoming book" . Took me 10 minutes to do this with an equal "budget" and the freeware graphics program Krita. Still has problematic issues (the curvature on that CRT looks like its suffering from bloody glaucoma), but it's vastly better than the origin…

This does look better! :)

Re: I'm writing a history of Visual Basic, Chapter 1 is up

#78

Post by chiph »

Scroll_Swe wrote: post #73
CWuestefeld wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

VB was never included in Windows (although it did include the runtime files). Windows did include other BASIC-related stuff, like GW-BASIC, QBasic, and VBScript.

Yes, not to program it but to run. But that makes the IDE and such an easy approval for management and IT to push out/install. Also batch. aaah, I love cmd.

Perhaps the VBRUNxxx.dll files were distributed with Windows later, but not at first. You had to include them in your install diskettes.

Re: I'm writing a history of Visual Basic, Chapter 1 is up

#79

Post by [deleted] »

booleandilemma wrote: post #7
vunderba wrote: post #2

Why 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.

[deleted]

Re: I'm writing a history of Visual Basic, Chapter 1 is up

#80

Post by OhMeadhbh »

Oh man... Completely ignores Tiny Basic, Dr. Dobbs, Li-Chen Wang, Dennis Allison, Copyleft, All Wrongs Reversed, etc. There are some decent histories of BASIC through the Dartmouth era, so I can understand why they may want to de-emphasize that.

My suspicion is, however, that BASIC became the 8-bit lingua franca not only because of Gates, Allen & Davidoff's work on the Altair but because of Wang and Pittman's work on Tiny BASIC. The TRS-80 initially shipped with a modified version of Wang's Tiny BASIC. The Apple ][ shipped initially with a Tiny BASIC like interpreter (Integer BASIC) written by Steve Wozniak.

By 1980, all the popular micros had licensed BASIC from MSFT and it's important to understand why. But before understanding why homegrown Tandy, TI, Atari and Apple BASICs fizzled, you have to know they existed first.

#OldManYellsAtClouds

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