Ooh, nice to see my project here. I was the lead developer of Ruby (no relation to the programming language), which became the "visual" side of Visual Basic.
Ruby was originally going to be a customizable shell/desktop for Windows 3.0, with pretty much what Bill was demoing but a more modest scripting language - and the ability to plug in other scripting languages as desired.
Microsoft decided to make Basic the scripting language and sell it as a standalone development system instead of being the Windows shell.
I guess my great claim to fame is the VBX (Visual Basic eXtension) interface, which I originally called the Gizmo API. I still think "gizmo" was a much better name than "control" as Microsoft later called them.
VB used to be one of the most important technologies in our field. No, it was never "good" nor "elegant". But it allowed a huge humber small and medium businesses to benefit from computers. All those DVD/VHS rental stores? VB. Line of business applications for government? VB.
Visual Basic allowed people with minimal knowledge of computers to write useful applications that powered the economy. This is something we often forget nowadays in the flood of frameworks, programming paradigms, microservices etc. Computers exist to serve humans, we must never lose the connection with how useful our systems are.
It also allowed a lot of young people (ie me) to learn to make legitimate looking GUI programs without a difficult barrier to entry, on whatever windows machines our schools/houses had lying around.
Believe it or not, the legacy point of sale product I work on still uses a VB6 app for the cash office and reporting functions. A number of large grocery stores still use it in the US and abroad. I don’t work on that part of the application, but it still works just fine on Windows 11.
> Visual Basic allowed people with minimal knowledge of computers to write useful applications that powered the economy. This is something we often forget nowadays in the flood of frameworks, programming paradigms, microservices etc.
We haven’t forgotten anything. MS Power Apps is the spiritual successor for Access.
Also, it’s the likely reason that startups like AirTable went unicorn, and if you look at Salesforce and ServiceNow they look a lot like enterprise versions of MS Access. Everything mentioned is a low code platform. I’m sure if you give me time I can name more major low code companies
What you’ve forgotten in your nostalgia is the instability and insecurity related to VB and everything that relies on it. It’s probably why MS is trying to kill it for Windows 12.
You can use the Godot engine to build apps. It has a very similar drag/drop UI. Double click for events, and gdscript is very easy to pickup. Reminds me of VB everytime I use it
>Visual Basic allowed people with minimal knowledge of computers to write useful applications
Over a weekend, I built a very useful application using only the `yad` [1] tool, sqlite3, and BASH scripts. Its a membership system with integrated Bluetooth, QR codes, Markdown for membership cards, and so on.
I was impressed with how quickly it all came together.
It was delightful to be programming forms, using BASH to validate the results, and then stuff things into a relational database - all with common tools available with ease on the newly installed Raspberry Pi.
I was struck with how pleasant it felt to be coding this way. Immediate forms, very rapid validation logic, and a great set of tools to do data mangling. I even managed to convince ChatGPT to give me a "randomized test data" script that populated my nascent database with acceptable data for the purposes of continued development. Suddenly, rendering Markdown from the .sqlite3 database was fun!
We've come a long way. I didn't have to fuss much to gain access to many of these tools. Of course it helps that I know a bit of `yad` to be dangerous, enough sqlite3 to be productive, and just enough BASH to tie it all together.
I couldn't help but feel, somehow, that there was a way to make a GUI for these three tools, though ..
Web browsers. The idea of "programming with markup language" meant a focus on writing text in order to get anything to work. There were some initial attempts at trying to make a WYSIWYG to wrestle with html and javascript, and later css, but the underlying markup, and bizarre web page rendering rules, made WYSIWYGs horrible for making anything other than the ugliest Geocities pages. As more and more programs moved from native to the web, programmers were forced to write more code by hand. Eventually by 2010 there began a "coder culture" where technology was seen as inferior if it wasn't 10,000 lines written by hand with 20 frameworks that no single person could completely comprehend. Add to that the fact that programmers were rapidly becoming bootcamp-driven MBA dropouts looking to get a startup off the ground, and the culture gets ever more ingrained by people who don't know the history of what came before or how easy things used to be or why.
The need for responsive design. In 1990 you could make a pixel perfect design, that looked great on the 640 x 480 display that everyone used for everything. Today your application (i.e. your website) needs to look good on phones, tablets, laptops, etc.
VB was kind of crap if you wanted to do a scalable UI.
Qt has a visual designer that's less intuitive to use than VB was, but on the other hand you don't need to write all that resizing code by hand, or to be stuck with a fixed size window.
> In 1990 we had drag and drop UI creation, double-click on the button and write the code behind it. Where did we go wrong?
Many of us grew tired of being locked in to Microsoft's platform, their simple yet stifling assumptions and their hostile behavior.
Those who walked away from Microsoft's Omelas went in a thousand different directions. While some grew tired of being pioneers and returned or found new walled gardens, others refused to trade their freedom for comfort or simplicity.
Your question is flawed. We didn't go wrong. Programming is much more accessible to a much bigger audience today and we have better tools and techniques.
My dad actually worked at a startup (two programmers if I recall) in 1990 onward that wrote very similar software to MS Visual Basic and even has a BASIC derived language. It was called Realizer. They started working on this before MS announced VB, but I wouldn't be surprised if there was already similar software around. If I recall correctly, my dad was at a trade show and their booth was right next to Microsoft (whom he turned down an offer from the year prior to work at this startup instead).
Needless to say, we're watching the video of a VB demo, not a Realizer one :)
I can't find much online about the original Realizer, but there is a Wikipedia article for CA-Realizer, which was the version released after CA bought their company. CA-Realizer didn't really go anywhere and my dad eventually left CA as well. Very cool story though, and a large reason I chose to work at small companies fresh out of college too.
Hello there -I happened to be a former Within Technologies employee. You are correct that there were two primary programmers-Steve was the back end/compiler guy, and Peter was the front end guy. Was the trade show you're talking about Fall Comdex? That was after CA acquired us...I actually went since I was handling the OS/2 port of Realizer, and they wanted it demo'd at the show. What's your dad's first name, if you don't mind my asking? If it was Ivan he was my boss, and I have some funny Comdex stories involving him.
I still have the glossy and manual for Realizer too.
> I personally believe that Visual Basic did more for programming than Object-Oriented Languages did. Yet people laugh at VB and say its a bad language, and they've been talking about OO languages for decades. And no, Visual Basic wasn't a great language, but I think the easy database interfaces in VB were fundamentally more important.
My dad introduced me to Visual Basic when I was 13 and it honestly changed the trajectory of my life. Prior to this I wasn't overly interested in learning anything in particular. VB became a creative outlet and since that day I never stopped learning.
Loved hitting up PlanetSourceCode to get scripts and reverse engineer other peoples code to learn.
I built so many fun programs - the best of which was a chat programs using UDP so we could chat over the schools local network.
I started with VB 1.0 for DOS, (before that I used PDQ) and used VB all the way to 6.0 - I agree there hasn't been anything like it since.
However some of the downsides included DLL hell and requiring 3rd party components for functions like TCP/IP (IP-Works) and more advanced UI elements and so on. I remember investing quite a lot in such components - I recall componentsource.com as being a key marketplace. I think one of the main issues was OS integration, hooking into Win32 required all kinds of incantations. Decompilers were also an issue.
It brings back memories of a much simpler time in terms of development, especially the UI editor - it was so fast to just draw a few forms and hook them up to code. I used it a lot for statistics type interfaces, and CRUD type systems, however I wrote a P2P communication tool back in 2000 that even had VOIP. I also recall writing a game that wrapped OpenGL and running it on my SGI520 Windows NT box. So much fun.
I transitioned to .NET and C# and didn't look back or bother with VBScript.
However I recall at the time feeling so abandoned by Microsoft, having to learn another complete system from scratch - existing projects didn't come across cleanly.
Anyhow... just a bit of a greybeard rant about the 'good old times'...
Just as an aside - after playing around with BBC Basic during covid, I was so impressed how OS calls were implemented in the language. If VB integrated with Win32 to the same level BBC basic integrates with RiscOS it would have been pretty much the perfect tool in my opinion.
VB blows everything else today out of the water. Most kids would lose interest when you mention the word environment or toolchain. Being able to visually draw a control and then click the control to add code to its events was the best motivator because the results were instant. I can not believe how bad kids have it these days trying to learn to make an iOS app for instance, about 100 lines of code for what would be 5-10 in VB.
This brings back fond memories... For those interested, someone has been working on a "Visual Basic for Linux" called Gambas (Gambas Almost Means BASic): https://gambas.sourceforge.net/en/main.html
My first paid programming job was a VB6 app in ~2004 in high school. It was initially a volunteer thing for a local youth court assistance group but they paid us $100 at the end as a kind of surprise reward. The thing had a UI with the right tab movements and backed by mysql db, and even did correlation calculations for crime statistics.
I still have 1 VB app on my resume from way back then, I refuse to remove it!
And boy do I miss just making stupid games really really fast, and making actual productive applications also really really fast. I had made an HTML editor with previews, syntax highlighting (lol, my own 'algorithm' haha), project management tools, and everything. I was so proud of that.
The base fond VB memories are the simple joy of starting a new project (before .NET called them Solutions) and making the thing I had in mind in like a couple hours. Really miss that.
Does anyone know why the VB was named so? it had nothing to do with BASIC language. The wiki page says "Visual Basic was derived from BASIC" but I don't recall it being anything remotely close to BASIC. Or am I recollecting things wrongly? It has been 30 years :)
After QBasic, Visual Basic 3 on Windows 3.1 was my intro to programming.
Set aside the language syntax – the way that the IDE exposed all the UI properties to you was so enlightening. You couldn't help but learn how Windows expected controls to work.
I think Excel + Visual Basic is some kind of fixed point.
If you iterate long enough on your self developed backend/Frontend system to enable your BI department to work in their own with their data, it will eventually converge into something like a spreadsheet application with a custom DSL.
Or the database + SQL will be your converged application
Visual Basic was the greatest visual development environment I have ever used. Modern Visual Studio tooling is also pretty awesome if you're targeting Windows. I am less these days so do not have much use for this tool.
What a trip down memory lane (no pun intended)! Rest in peace, my WYSIWYG friend.
It was a rough ride bringing VB to the web. There was VB Active Server Pages, then VB.NET Webforms, which did not always produce the most performant or secure UI code. It was like an ornery bronco in the age of industry.
The concept of Viewstate was interesting and probably looked great in demo applications, but it was ultimately not the best way to avoid writing JavaScript. Sometimes it could be tamed, but for the sly cowboy, ruby on rails was the king of RAD.
The only place to buy VB 1.0 was an 800 number advertised in John Dvorak’s column in PC Info. I assume partners had access too, but it wasn’t on a shelf anywhere.
Something is probably difficult to find these days is a CEO that writes code, and probably even more difficult one that writes code live in front of the audience!
[+] [-] Stratoscope|2 years ago|reply
Ruby was originally going to be a customizable shell/desktop for Windows 3.0, with pretty much what Bill was demoing but a more modest scripting language - and the ability to plug in other scripting languages as desired.
Microsoft decided to make Basic the scripting language and sell it as a standalone development system instead of being the Windows shell.
I guess my great claim to fame is the VBX (Visual Basic eXtension) interface, which I originally called the Gizmo API. I still think "gizmo" was a much better name than "control" as Microsoft later called them.
AMA.
[+] [-] glimshe|2 years ago|reply
Visual Basic allowed people with minimal knowledge of computers to write useful applications that powered the economy. This is something we often forget nowadays in the flood of frameworks, programming paradigms, microservices etc. Computers exist to serve humans, we must never lose the connection with how useful our systems are.
[+] [-] antonjs|2 years ago|reply
That and Delphi, how I miss you.
[+] [-] heywire|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] chaostheory|2 years ago|reply
We haven’t forgotten anything. MS Power Apps is the spiritual successor for Access.
Also, it’s the likely reason that startups like AirTable went unicorn, and if you look at Salesforce and ServiceNow they look a lot like enterprise versions of MS Access. Everything mentioned is a low code platform. I’m sure if you give me time I can name more major low code companies
What you’ve forgotten in your nostalgia is the instability and insecurity related to VB and everything that relies on it. It’s probably why MS is trying to kill it for Windows 12.
[+] [-] nomel|2 years ago|reply
It was great for the time. I still don't see time travel debug in any of most modern IDEs.
[+] [-] jotato|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] MichaelZuo|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] worik|2 years ago|reply
Node.js for a modern take?
[+] [-] signaru|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] xtracto|2 years ago|reply
Too bad theres nothing as good an ubiquitous nowadays.
[+] [-] discussDev|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] helpfulContrib|2 years ago|reply
Over a weekend, I built a very useful application using only the `yad` [1] tool, sqlite3, and BASH scripts. Its a membership system with integrated Bluetooth, QR codes, Markdown for membership cards, and so on.
I was impressed with how quickly it all came together.
It was delightful to be programming forms, using BASH to validate the results, and then stuff things into a relational database - all with common tools available with ease on the newly installed Raspberry Pi.
I was struck with how pleasant it felt to be coding this way. Immediate forms, very rapid validation logic, and a great set of tools to do data mangling. I even managed to convince ChatGPT to give me a "randomized test data" script that populated my nascent database with acceptable data for the purposes of continued development. Suddenly, rendering Markdown from the .sqlite3 database was fun!
We've come a long way. I didn't have to fuss much to gain access to many of these tools. Of course it helps that I know a bit of `yad` to be dangerous, enough sqlite3 to be productive, and just enough BASH to tie it all together.
I couldn't help but feel, somehow, that there was a way to make a GUI for these three tools, though ..
[1] - https://github.com/v1cont/yad
[+] [-] 369548684892826|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] 0xbadcafebee|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] DominikPeters|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dale_glass|2 years ago|reply
Qt has a visual designer that's less intuitive to use than VB was, but on the other hand you don't need to write all that resizing code by hand, or to be stuck with a fixed size window.
[+] [-] steve1977|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] srhtftw|2 years ago|reply
Many of us grew tired of being locked in to Microsoft's platform, their simple yet stifling assumptions and their hostile behavior.
Those who walked away from Microsoft's Omelas went in a thousand different directions. While some grew tired of being pioneers and returned or found new walled gardens, others refused to trade their freedom for comfort or simplicity.
[+] [-] mseepgood|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jlas|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Pompidou|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nickstinemates|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] add-sub-mul-div|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] WillAdams|2 years ago|reply
https://livecode.com/
[+] [-] jotato|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rchaud|2 years ago|reply
I can't believe there's no browser-based point and click software that lets you build web apps in JS.
[+] [-] unknown|2 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] keithnz|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gardenhedge|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Beached|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jjice|2 years ago|reply
Needless to say, we're watching the video of a VB demo, not a Realizer one :)
I can't find much online about the original Realizer, but there is a Wikipedia article for CA-Realizer, which was the version released after CA bought their company. CA-Realizer didn't really go anywhere and my dad eventually left CA as well. Very cool story though, and a large reason I chose to work at small companies fresh out of college too.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CA-Realizer
[+] [-] unknown|2 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] craig_m|2 years ago|reply
I still have the glossy and manual for Realizer too.
[+] [-] dist-epoch|2 years ago|reply
> I personally believe that Visual Basic did more for programming than Object-Oriented Languages did. Yet people laugh at VB and say its a bad language, and they've been talking about OO languages for decades. And no, Visual Basic wasn't a great language, but I think the easy database interfaces in VB were fundamentally more important.
https://blog.codinghorror.com/linus-torvalds-visual-basic-fa...
[+] [-] cstrat|2 years ago|reply
Loved hitting up PlanetSourceCode to get scripts and reverse engineer other peoples code to learn.
I built so many fun programs - the best of which was a chat programs using UDP so we could chat over the schools local network.
[+] [-] appstorelottery|2 years ago|reply
However some of the downsides included DLL hell and requiring 3rd party components for functions like TCP/IP (IP-Works) and more advanced UI elements and so on. I remember investing quite a lot in such components - I recall componentsource.com as being a key marketplace. I think one of the main issues was OS integration, hooking into Win32 required all kinds of incantations. Decompilers were also an issue.
It brings back memories of a much simpler time in terms of development, especially the UI editor - it was so fast to just draw a few forms and hook them up to code. I used it a lot for statistics type interfaces, and CRUD type systems, however I wrote a P2P communication tool back in 2000 that even had VOIP. I also recall writing a game that wrapped OpenGL and running it on my SGI520 Windows NT box. So much fun.
I transitioned to .NET and C# and didn't look back or bother with VBScript.
However I recall at the time feeling so abandoned by Microsoft, having to learn another complete system from scratch - existing projects didn't come across cleanly.
Anyhow... just a bit of a greybeard rant about the 'good old times'...
Just as an aside - after playing around with BBC Basic during covid, I was so impressed how OS calls were implemented in the language. If VB integrated with Win32 to the same level BBC basic integrates with RiscOS it would have been pretty much the perfect tool in my opinion.
[+] [-] pcdoodle|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] remyt|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cryptoz|2 years ago|reply
I still have 1 VB app on my resume from way back then, I refuse to remove it!
And boy do I miss just making stupid games really really fast, and making actual productive applications also really really fast. I had made an HTML editor with previews, syntax highlighting (lol, my own 'algorithm' haha), project management tools, and everything. I was so proud of that.
The base fond VB memories are the simple joy of starting a new project (before .NET called them Solutions) and making the thing I had in mind in like a couple hours. Really miss that.
[+] [-] tiffanyh|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] WillAdams|2 years ago|reply
https://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?story=MacBasic.txt
(I bought a copy of Microsoft BASIC for Macintosh, and would have much rather had MacBasic)
[+] [-] gauravphoenix|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] TehShrike|2 years ago|reply
Set aside the language syntax – the way that the IDE exposed all the UI properties to you was so enlightening. You couldn't help but learn how Windows expected controls to work.
[+] [-] dang|2 years ago|reply
Bill Gates demonstrates Visual Basic (1991) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24435217 - Sept 2020 (11 comments)
[+] [-] weitzj|2 years ago|reply
If you iterate long enough on your self developed backend/Frontend system to enable your BI department to work in their own with their data, it will eventually converge into something like a spreadsheet application with a custom DSL.
Or the database + SQL will be your converged application
[+] [-] nickstinemates|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] this_steve_j|2 years ago|reply
It was a rough ride bringing VB to the web. There was VB Active Server Pages, then VB.NET Webforms, which did not always produce the most performant or secure UI code. It was like an ornery bronco in the age of industry.
The concept of Viewstate was interesting and probably looked great in demo applications, but it was ultimately not the best way to avoid writing JavaScript. Sometimes it could be tamed, but for the sly cowboy, ruby on rails was the king of RAD.
[+] [-] ChicagoDave|2 years ago|reply
$99. I bought it instantly.
[+] [-] vander_elst|2 years ago|reply