The History and Legacy of Visual Basic

Hi! I was the lead developer for Ruby (no relation to the programming language), which became the &quot;visual&quot; side of Visual Basic.<p>It is nice to see this article again.<p>Perhaps my favorite part is this true story that I shared with Ryan at Retool.<p>If you ever wonder why we &quot;fire&quot; an event, this is why:<p># # #<p>I was looking for a name for one gizmo sending a message to another. I knew that SQL had &quot;triggers,&quot; and Windows had SendMessage, but I didn&#x27;t like those names.<p>I got frustrated one night and started firing rubber bands at my screen to help me think. It was a habit I had back then to shake up my thinking. Probably more practical on a tough glass CRT than on a modern flat screen! After firing a few rubber bands, I was still stuck. So I fired up a doobie to see if that would help. As I flicked my lighter and looked at the fire, it all came together. Fire a rubber band. Fire up a doobie. Fire an event!<p># # #<p>My other claim to fame may have been the VBX. It was likely one of the worst APIs in history, but also one of the most successful.<p>Go figure.<p>As they say, AMA!<p>And as it happens, I am looking for work. If anyone doesn&#x27;t mind working with an older programmer who is still enthusiastic and productive and creative, you know where to find me.

I miss VB6 so much.<p>For rapidly prototyping an idea, I have yet to find anything that was as good as VB6. Drag a button, write code. Want to change things about the button? Use properties, that live update the GUI without recompiling. It was so simple that a reasonably intelligent person could grasp it in an afternoon, but in the hands of a capable developer could do some very impressive things.<p>It was also a fun game to hunt for VBX&#x2F;OCX controls that you could use in things that were downloaded or came on random disks or CDs.<p>I really feel like VB6 was the peak of that development model and we&#x27;ve been moving away from it since. And I get some of the reasons why (just look at the mess that comes from trying to do anything with Xcode storyboards and version control.) But for just rapidly trying out an idea, I have yet to find anything anywhere that was as good as VB6 was.

What people forget is that VBA is still built in to every copy of Desktop Excel (press alt f11) and is used by entire industries that are disconnected from the open source tech online discourse. In a lot of locked down business environments its the only automation an employee has access to. If macros suddenly got Thanos snapped out of existence tomorrow the entire economy would grind to a halt. People keep saying VB is dead but it probably processed some of your information today somewhere in some cubicle.

What a great article. My first exposure to real programming was VB and it’s hard to overstate how magical it was to just drag a button onto a form, and double click on it to write a few lines of code and wire it up. TBH it’s still something that I miss in the modern world, likely killed forever by the huge diversity of display devices.<p>It’s funny how lousy VB (and PHP a few years later) were as programming languages, even for the time. But they got stuff done, which is a good lesson.

Growing up in a third world country with no formal CS classes, I will never forget the wonder and awe I felt when I coded a simple calculator after self-teaching myself VB6 from a book I stumbled upon. The simplicity of drag and drop and the fluidity with which it simply worked has remained unmatched. I tried going back into App development time and again but these new container based paradigm just never clicked for me.

&gt; Cooper decided to promptly throw away the 25,000 lines of messy prototype C code that comprised Tripod and start over from scratch, feeling like it was so irredeemably full of time-pressured hacks, it&#x27;d simply be easier to rewrite it with a cleaner design.<p>Usually this is either a sign of a terrible programmer or a very competent and experienced one, and it&#x27;s hard to know which without seeing their other work. But I&#x27;ve done this before, and to good effect. Writing code is not hard. Figuring things out is hard. But once the things are figured out and well understood, rewriting them in a cleaner design is especially easy. Granted, it still takes <i>time</i>, that sometimes that time can be on a scale of months. But the more experienced you are, the more you can estimate that time more accurately.

Honestly, while growing up.. There&#x27;s something really amazing about the intuitiveness of tools like Macromedia Flash, Visual Basic, Audacity&#x2F;even FL Studio that we&#x27;ve had so many people being able to pick up these tools without having to resort to so much documentation&#x2F;tutorials.<p>I don&#x27;t think I could&#x27;ve done that with any of the HTML5 &#x2F; Web tools that were touted as an alternative at that time... Or probably even today. I mean sure there&#x27;s MIT scratch that does half as many things as visual basic. But i feel like we need a little more &quot;mature&quot; tools that fill these gaps. I could be wrong and there&#x27;s much better replacements these days..

I wrote a Missile Command game in VB3, that was a very long time ago. I think I sold just over 400 copies, mostly from Compuserve.<p>Link: (the web emulator is very slow)<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;classicreload.com&#x2F;play&#x2F;nisus-missile-master.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;classicreload.com&#x2F;play&#x2F;nisus-missile-master.html</a>

I personally consider the abandonment (and lack of replacement) of Visual Basic to be an indictment of the entire tech industry. The industry does not want people to be able to write software easily, because it would put software companies out of a job. I&#x27;m glad that AI has finally arrived so it can kill programming. Once the programmers figure this out they may prevent it from being too easy to use AI to create software. If they&#x27;re not really careful, it might even make web browsers obsolete.

I was a proficient C&#x2F;C++ programmer for DOS and embedded, but found programming apps for Windows to be very overwhelming and tedious. So for a few years there VB was an excellent way for me to build little Windows tools and apps, until I eventually put in the effort to get good at MFC. I dropped that as soon as C# came out.

Before (2023) - <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=35192913">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=35192913</a>

It really was one of the best language and ide environments that was completely pushed aside by security considerations from the much more widely used general purpose internet web browser.

I bought VB 1.0 from an 800 number in Dvorak’s back page PC Week article. I still have the floppies and manuals.<p>I made a lot of consulting cash being an expert in VB 6.<p>When .NET came out, I switched to C# and learned object-oriented programming. (Ironically by reading Bruce Eckel’s “Thinking in Java”).

Back in the day, we were building COM components in C++ with the STL. One of the discoveries is you could build out the same COM component in VB and maybe take only a 5% hit to performance. Was one of those &#x27;we are not telling anyone we can do this&#x27; moments. Beyond the UI portion, it had some really powerful capabilities.

I’ve just started playing with retool to act as a data visualization frontend to big query. If you’re nostalgic for VB, it’s worth giving them a shot. I’m only a couple days in but I’m finding it very promising

VB got me into programming as a teen in the 90s. I even managed to create several small games without having much of a clue. Good times.

Both VB and Hypercard were amazing, for Windows and Mac, respectively<p>Anyone thinking of doing it on the Web?

Ob VB, performance wise, giving how &#x27;fast&#x27; some C64 written in VB ran, I think it was on par of TCL&#x2F;Tk, if not worse for some cases and better in a few obvious cases (Direct Draw&#x2F;Direct X), but Unix people wrote the core in C and they put a Tk UI on top giving great speeds.<p>And, on people praising VBA integration under MS Office, that gave us security disasters with macros and millions of dollars lost because of Excel parsing genomics as dates.<p>It&#x27;s better to decouple data and algorythms as <i>separate</i> files. Keep your raw data in a file, transform it and set the output in a separate process and file. You know, a proper pipeline. Something the Unix folks understood since the very beginning 50 years ago.<p>But &quot;performance&quot; fanboys don&#x27;t care, until the shit hits the fan as it happened in Science with bioinformatics. Tons of studies, papers and research were just void because of shitty software.<p>Meanwhile, some Unix users with Slackware with discrete tools for every process (and not just a self-updating XLS file for everything) did it fine as they followed a basic reproducible chain.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;slackalaxy.com&#x2F;2019&#x2F;03&#x2F;15&#x2F;slackware-and-slackbuilds-org-cited-in-a-scientific-publication&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;slackalaxy.com&#x2F;2019&#x2F;03&#x2F;15&#x2F;slackware-and-slackbuilds-...</a><p>Harder? Yes, OFC. But, can you bet that your initial data will be the same on <i>every</i> process? For sure.