3 ms·

I wonder if you are confusing Visual Basic with something else. As far as I know, VBA, VBScript, and VB.Net are "regular" Turing complete programming languages

I wonder if you are confusing Visual Basic with something else. As far as I know, VBA, VBScript, and VB.Net are "regular" Turing complete programming languages that can access anything on a Windows machine and not some sort of visual programming as such. The VBA editor is not up to modern standards, but it's pretty nice from the perspective of someone who started out in the 1980s with various MS Basics. The various forms of the language are not simpler than old fashioned Basic, but have a fair amount added. What fits your description more, in my experience, is Microsoft Power Automate, which is a sort of low/no code environment that is only slightly better that Malbolge IMO. It makes it incredibly difficult bordering on impossible to reuse logic.

sokoloff 5y ago
I’m more in agreement with GP. Legacy Visual Basic had a substantial use case of visual editing of forms and form elements with a programming language behind it so you could attach actions to events. What they said resonated with my unfortunate experience working in VB for around 6 months back in the mid to late 90s.
squeaky-clean 5y ago
My first programming class at a school was Visual Basic (Maybe 5 or 6.0?) and it was definitely very drag and drop GUI based. Drag buttons and text fields onto a panel, click them and edit their Metadata in the sidebar, doubleclick them and Visual Studio would open a file with an auto generated OnClick() handler with an empty body and a bunch of comments surrounding it saying something along the lines of "do not edit anything before/after this line." You'd run it by clicking the big green arrow button and I got an A in that class without ever knowing how to actually build and share an executable. I made a blackjack game and tried sharing it with some friends but it only ever ran on my machine (because only I had Visual Studio installed). A better teacher would have helped too, haha. Nothing against him, from what I understand he was the business class teacher and taught 1 period of intro to programming because the school couldn't find a replacement for the previous years' teacher.
mftb 5y ago
He's not confusing it with something else. He's describing ~VB4-6. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Visual_Basic_(classic) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Visual_Basic_(classic)
- commandlinefan 5y ago
  Yes, VB from the 90s. I moved to web development and haven’t looked at it again since - they may have improved it since.
- perl4ever 5y ago
  Designing an interface layout by drag and drop has been around since basically the beginning of GUIs. It's not "no-code", it's just defining the interface in a standard way as data. People have tried from time to time to make a programming environment to appeal to, that is graspable by, people who are allergic to entering code in a text editor. Sometimes it looks sort of like "programming" by drawing a flow chart. And it generally, as far as I know, either fails to be easy enough for most people, or makes anything complex horribly cumbersome. As I said, Power Automate is a (horrible) example. "a visual programming language (VPL) is any programming language that lets users create programs by manipulating program elements graphically rather than by specifying them textually." "The Visual Basic, Visual C#, Visual J# etc. languages of the Microsoft Visual Studio IDE are not visual programming languages: the representation of algorithms etc. is textual even though the IDE embellishes the editing and debugging activities with a rich user interface." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Visual_programming_language https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Visual_programming_language So the original comment sounded perfectly reasonable to me, except it sounded like a critique of something other than VB. I remember this from the 90s, although I never used it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prograph https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prograph
  - CRConrad 5y ago
    > Designing an interface layout by drag and drop has been around since basically the beginning of GUIs. It's not "no-code", it's just defining the interface in a standard way as data. The GGP didn't call VB "no-code". That was referring to Salesforce.

sokoloff 5y ago

I’m more in agreement with GP. Legacy Visual Basic had a substantial use case of visual editing of forms and form elements with a programming language behind it so you could attach actions to events. What they said resonated with my unfortunate experience working in VB for around 6 months back in the mid to late 90s.

squeaky-clean 5y ago

My first programming class at a school was Visual Basic (Maybe 5 or 6.0?) and it was definitely very drag and drop GUI based. Drag buttons and text fields onto a panel, click them and edit their Metadata in the sidebar, doubleclick them and Visual Studio would open a file with an auto generated OnClick() handler with an empty body and a bunch of comments surrounding it saying something along the lines of "do not edit anything before/after this line." You'd run it by clicking the big green arrow button and I got an A in that class without ever knowing how to actually build and share an executable. I made a blackjack game and tried sharing it with some friends but it only ever ran on my machine (because only I had Visual Studio installed). A better teacher would have helped too, haha. Nothing against him, from what I understand he was the business class teacher and taught 1 period of intro to programming because the school couldn't find a replacement for the previous years' teacher.

mftb 5y ago

He's not confusing it with something else. He's describing ~VB4-6. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Visual_Basic_(classic) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Visual_Basic_(classic)

commandlinefan 5y ago
Yes, VB from the 90s. I moved to web development and haven’t looked at it again since - they may have improved it since.
perl4ever 5y ago
Designing an interface layout by drag and drop has been around since basically the beginning of GUIs. It's not "no-code", it's just defining the interface in a standard way as data. People have tried from time to time to make a programming environment to appeal to, that is graspable by, people who are allergic to entering code in a text editor. Sometimes it looks sort of like "programming" by drawing a flow chart. And it generally, as far as I know, either fails to be easy enough for most people, or makes anything complex horribly cumbersome. As I said, Power Automate is a (horrible) example. "a visual programming language (VPL) is any programming language that lets users create programs by manipulating program elements graphically rather than by specifying them textually." "The Visual Basic, Visual C#, Visual J# etc. languages of the Microsoft Visual Studio IDE are not visual programming languages: the representation of algorithms etc. is textual even though the IDE embellishes the editing and debugging activities with a rich user interface." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Visual_programming_language https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Visual_programming_language So the original comment sounded perfectly reasonable to me, except it sounded like a critique of something other than VB. I remember this from the 90s, although I never used it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prograph https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prograph
- CRConrad 5y ago
  > Designing an interface layout by drag and drop has been around since basically the beginning of GUIs. It's not "no-code", it's just defining the interface in a standard way as data. The GGP didn't call VB "no-code". That was referring to Salesforce.