4 ms·

I know what you mean, and I've often wondered why this hasn't happened yet. I honestly think that a big reason why this has not yet happened is that most of the

by alxlaz 8y ago

I know what you mean, and I've often wondered why this hasn't happened yet. I honestly think that a big reason why this has not yet happened is that most of the young folks who are equipped with the kind of free time and expertise to do it have no idea how easy Visual Basic was. And not just VB6 -- NeXTStep/OpenSTEP, Delphi... They were never exposed to the successes -- and many, many failures -- of the RAD environments of the 1990s. (I've been toggling bits and writing C for a living for a long time now, I certainly suck at anything web-related). You look at enthusiastic web developers telling you that Electron is easy if you couple it with React (I think?) or Photon, and I mean, they're sort of right if you're comparing it to GTK (or ohgodohgodohgod MFC). But if you've touched Visual Basic, NeXTStep (or Cocoa, or GNUStep), or even Qt for that matter, it seems anything but easy. It's illuminating to show someone who's reasonably apt with computers but never wrote much code (save, maybe, for some Excel formulas) how to write the "canonical" currency converter app from the NeXTStep docs. You need to explain pretty much four concepts to get them to grok how things work in Visual Basic: what a form is, what an event is, what an event handler is, and how you get and set data from and to UI elements. You can whip it up together in 30 minutes, tops, and they can do a variation on that topic all by themselves the next day. You need half that time just to explain what CSS is and how to center most things with it, and then you get into the whole renderer process vs. main process thing. Eww. I suppose the other big reason is that things like branding and recognition are touted as Really Important (TM), so no one really wants to design a tool that helps you build an interface that looks like any other interface (somewhat ironic, considering how uniform and compliant web design is in 2018).

AnIdiotOnTheNet 8y ago
I often lament that the kind of empowerment things like Visual Basic --and before it QBasic, BASICA, and the 8-bit micro BASICs-- brought us pretty much no longer exists in modern computing. Allowing people to easily build their own tools to solve their own problems is a big part of what personal computing is all about as far as I'm concerned, and there's just no effort put into it today. Even on something like Linux, which you'd think would have a community favorable of the concept, you instead have a bunch of elitists declaring that only professional C greybeards should even be allowed to change the background color.
- jodrellblank 8y ago
  I feel that lament, but I wonder what problems people have now, that aren't more easily solved with an existing desktop program or an app? (implying that all easily solved problems have been solved many times over, which makes now different from the 1990s. And modern solutions are more complex to reflect more complex computing reality).
  - AnIdiotOnTheNet 8y ago
    Why do people still pipe commandline tools together to do things? Hasn't someone written a program to solve their problem? There are an infinite number of problems, and being able to construct your own tools to solve them is still enormously useful. It's one of the reasons Excel is still so popular. > modern solutions are more complex to reflect more complex computing reality This is a convenient lie developers tell themselves to justify their complexity fetish instead of thinking about how to simplify things.
    - jodrellblank 8y ago
      This is a convenient lie developers tell themselves to justify their complexity fetish instead of thinking about how to simplify things. VB dates back to 1991, with its last release in 1998. Before popular email, before people wanted high-res photo processing and music file tagging, before people wanted to write their own 3d games, before ordinary people wanted cross-platform tools, when everything was ASCII and that was fine, before people had cloud backups or wanted to cross-post their Wordpress blogs to Twitter, before they wanted to integrate with Philips Hue bulbs or have their code run on an rPI, or integrate with an XML web service or a REST API or download 10GB of mapping data and look for patterns in it. If you're going to argue that the computing landscape is no different to 20 years ago in complexity, and the tasks people want to do are no different, it's going to be a tough argument. But if you do argue that, then you have no problem because VB still exists and you can buy it on eBay. If you think nothing's changed, that should be as good a solution as it ever was, right? Why do people still pipe commandline tools together to do things? Hasn't someone written a program to solve their problem? Do ordinary people do that?

by alxlaz 8y ago

AnIdiotOnTheNet 8y ago

I often lament that the kind of empowerment things like Visual Basic --and before it QBasic, BASICA, and the 8-bit micro BASICs-- brought us pretty much no longer exists in modern computing. Allowing people to easily build their own tools to solve their own problems is a big part of what personal computing is all about as far as I'm concerned, and there's just no effort put into it today. Even on something like Linux, which you'd think would have a community favorable of the concept, you instead have a bunch of elitists declaring that only professional C greybeards should even be allowed to change the background color.

jodrellblank 8y ago
I feel that lament, but I wonder what problems people have now, that aren't more easily solved with an existing desktop program or an app? (implying that all easily solved problems have been solved many times over, which makes now different from the 1990s. And modern solutions are more complex to reflect more complex computing reality).
- AnIdiotOnTheNet 8y ago
  Why do people still pipe commandline tools together to do things? Hasn't someone written a program to solve their problem? There are an infinite number of problems, and being able to construct your own tools to solve them is still enormously useful. It's one of the reasons Excel is still so popular. > modern solutions are more complex to reflect more complex computing reality This is a convenient lie developers tell themselves to justify their complexity fetish instead of thinking about how to simplify things.
  - jodrellblank 8y ago
    This is a convenient lie developers tell themselves to justify their complexity fetish instead of thinking about how to simplify things. VB dates back to 1991, with its last release in 1998. Before popular email, before people wanted high-res photo processing and music file tagging, before people wanted to write their own 3d games, before ordinary people wanted cross-platform tools, when everything was ASCII and that was fine, before people had cloud backups or wanted to cross-post their Wordpress blogs to Twitter, before they wanted to integrate with Philips Hue bulbs or have their code run on an rPI, or integrate with an XML web service or a REST API or download 10GB of mapping data and look for patterns in it. If you're going to argue that the computing landscape is no different to 20 years ago in complexity, and the tasks people want to do are no different, it's going to be a tough argument. But if you do argue that, then you have no problem because VB still exists and you can buy it on eBay. If you think nothing's changed, that should be as good a solution as it ever was, right? Why do people still pipe commandline tools together to do things? Hasn't someone written a program to solve their problem? Do ordinary people do that?