[lucastech]

I have to say, Visual Basic 4.0 changed my life when I was introduced to it at the age of 12. I had written Basic before that, but being able to build drag and drop create a GUI on top of my code was what really hooked me on programming. I built and sold my first desktop application at 14 that I wrote by myself in VB6 and used VB6 for all of my jobs through 21 when I had to upgrade a VB6 application to C#.net.

I often harp on how much I wish someone would build a simple GUI for the modern desktop or web environment, instead of spending ages fighting css and javascript for even the most basic layouts. Visual Basic just removed all of the complexity, nothing filled that gap before VB or after VB. Sadly, even VB these days is a mess ever since winforms stopped being the primary target interface.

Thank you for what you built, I've been writing code for 26 years now as a direct result of it.

[Stratoscope]

Oh my gosh! This means a lot to me.

I should mention that wasn't just me. Alan Cooper came up with the initial idea and a prototype called Tripod and showed it to Bill Gates. After Microsoft funded the project, Alan hired me, and Gary Kratkin, Frank Raab, and Mark Merker to build out the actual Ruby product. And then a team at Microsoft melded it with Basic to become Visual Basic.

I am really grateful that you and so many people put our work to good use!

[90s_dev]

> I often harp on how much I wish someone would build a simple GUI for the modern desktop or web environment, instead of spending ages fighting css and javascript for even the most basic layouts.

I read comments like this nearly every day, and they make me so excited to announce my project soon! But I don't want to botch the release, so I'm trying to finish it properly and not rush or announce it too soon.