6 ms·

To be fair, s/he was responding to "Today you have to download and understand a stack of tools and languages before you get anything printing on the screen." I

To be fair, s/he was responding to "Today you have to download and understand a stack of tools and languages before you get anything printing on the screen." It is true that people don't generally ship code written in devtools, but then most of the programs shipped on the Commodore 64 were not written in basic. (Unless you count hundreds of peeks and pokes as basic.) I do miss the immediacy of the programming experience, but I also think the correct modern day analog of that is the browser.

ModernMech 8y ago
> but I also think the correct modern day analog of that is the browser. The browser is exactly what I had in mind when I said "you have to learn a stack of languages". Sure, okay, console.log() gets you "hello world", but so does "echo" so maybe I placed the bar too low. Still, getting into the modern web experience requires you to learn HTML + CSS + Javascript and how they relate and interop. Fast forward a little bit from the BASIC days to Visual Basic. Back then you could write a desktop application with a GUI, controls, a window, and needed one language and one environment. I don't see how the browser world is easier or more approachable than that.
- hutzlibu 8y ago
  Well," Back then you could write a desktop application with a GUI, controls, a window, and needed one language and one environment. " you still had to learn the different gui frameworks and how they work. Also, if you want, you can write GUI in the browser without html/css, with the canvas element. There are frameworks for that, not sure how mature they are, though.
  - ModernMech 8y ago
    > you still had to learn the different gui frameworks and how they work. No you didn't, it was built into the VB editor; you just dragged and dropped elements into a window frame, then edited callback functions. You didn't have to leave VB at all or learn any other language or framework.
    - hutzlibu 8y ago
      Ah ok, I never used VB. I experienced that with Delphi ... and much more elaborate with Adobes Flex(or more beautiful, but less clean, with Flash), which is pretty dead nowdays unfortunately and I have not found a replacement. Any tool which tried to do this for HTML has been horrible so far.
- meredydd 8y ago
  Agreed - the browser leaves much to be desired as an accessible dev platform, and the web as a whole is even worse! (Why do I need to learn HTML, CSS, JS, Python, SQL and React/Redux/Bootstrap/Flash/SQLAlchemy just to get started?! And that's not mentioning Webpack, AWS, shell scripting...). We've built an explicitly Visual Basic-like programming environment for the web - it's got one language (Python), drag'n'drop design, built in database, actual working autocompletion - the works: https://anvil.works https://anvil.works. Would love to hear what you think!

ModernMech 8y ago

> but I also think the correct modern day analog of that is the browser. The browser is exactly what I had in mind when I said "you have to learn a stack of languages". Sure, okay, console.log() gets you "hello world", but so does "echo" so maybe I placed the bar too low. Still, getting into the modern web experience requires you to learn HTML + CSS + Javascript and how they relate and interop. Fast forward a little bit from the BASIC days to Visual Basic. Back then you could write a desktop application with a GUI, controls, a window, and needed one language and one environment. I don't see how the browser world is easier or more approachable than that.

hutzlibu 8y ago
Well," Back then you could write a desktop application with a GUI, controls, a window, and needed one language and one environment. " you still had to learn the different gui frameworks and how they work. Also, if you want, you can write GUI in the browser without html/css, with the canvas element. There are frameworks for that, not sure how mature they are, though.
- ModernMech 8y ago
  > you still had to learn the different gui frameworks and how they work. No you didn't, it was built into the VB editor; you just dragged and dropped elements into a window frame, then edited callback functions. You didn't have to leave VB at all or learn any other language or framework.
  - hutzlibu 8y ago
    Ah ok, I never used VB. I experienced that with Delphi ... and much more elaborate with Adobes Flex(or more beautiful, but less clean, with Flash), which is pretty dead nowdays unfortunately and I have not found a replacement. Any tool which tried to do this for HTML has been horrible so far.
meredydd 8y ago
Agreed - the browser leaves much to be desired as an accessible dev platform, and the web as a whole is even worse! (Why do I need to learn HTML, CSS, JS, Python, SQL and React/Redux/Bootstrap/Flash/SQLAlchemy just to get started?! And that's not mentioning Webpack, AWS, shell scripting...). We've built an explicitly Visual Basic-like programming environment for the web - it's got one language (Python), drag'n'drop design, built in database, actual working autocompletion - the works: https://anvil.works https://anvil.works. Would love to hear what you think!