4 ms·

VB was basically the MS response to Borland's Delphi, which had all this but better, plus Pascal was way more powerful and mature language than Basic. That sai

VB was basically the MS response to Borland's Delphi, which had all this but better, plus Pascal was way more powerful and mature language than Basic. That said, both Delphi and VB (and VC++ to some extent) were IMHO far superior tools for RAD building of GUI apps than any web-oriented tool that I've later seen. In web development we're still in Turbo Pascal and Quick Basic days, we've got good IDEs and helpers but you still have to write everything by hand.

deleted 4y ago
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jasode 4y ago
>VB was basically the MS response to Borland's Delphi, No, that wasn't the timeline. Visual Basic came out in 1991. Borland Delphi was +4 years later in 1995. (Borland Turbo Pascal for Windows was 1991 but Microsoft VB's internal product development codename "Thunder" was already started in 1990.) Visual Basic (especially the GUI forms IDE paradigm and VBX components) was built on earlier ideas in 1988 by Alan Cooper : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alan_Cooper#Visual_Basic https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alan_Cooper#Visual_Basic
- jhbadger 4y ago
  And earlier than this, there was Apple's HyperCard in 1987 which I'm sure both the creators of VB and Delphi were familiar with. HyperCard had buttons and fields that you dragged onto a window to make an interface, and then by clicking on these widgets you had access to their properties and could write code to have them do something.
- Stratoscope 4y ago
  This brings back fond memories. The wiki page does have a few inaccuracies. Here is a more detailed article from Alan himself: https://onezero.medium.com/my-one-phrase-resum%C3%A9-98776ef8a6fa https://onezero.medium.com/my-one-phrase-resum%C3%A9-98776ef... (Try an incognito window if Medium blocks you.) That article has a few inaccuracies too, but as the events were over 30 years ago, this can be forgiven. Read Alan's article and then come back for this followup. Alan mentioned the "gizmos". He actually originally called them "waldos", named after these: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Remote_manipulator https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Remote_manipulator I couldn't make sense of that name, so I suggested "gizmo", which seemed fun and more descriptive. That name stuck - for a while. Microsoft later renamed them to "controls". How boring! I also developed the "gizmo interface", which Microsoft renamed to VBX. (They were really not into fun names at the time.) It has sometimes been said that Bill Gates was the one who insisted that VB have an extension interface like this. The truth is more subtle. We had the gizmo interface all along. It was obvious that we would need it for our own gizmos, and that we should allow other developers to build their own gizmos. Apparently, the Microsoft team that turned Ruby+Basic into VB was going to keep the gizmo interface private and only let Microsoft developers use it, at least at first to save time on the schedule. Bill quite rightly saw the power of exposing the interface to outside developers and decided to make it part of the product - just as we had planned all along. And I built the "event arrows" that Alan mentioned. He originally called an event a "flimsy" (a British term for "lightweight paper used especially for multiple copies"). I couldn't make sense of that name either, so we kicked it around and settled on "event". This left a problem of what to name the act of sending an event from one gizmo to another. I was familiar with the term "trigger" from SQL, but that didn't seem quite right, and we were into fun names. But I couldn't think of one! At the time, when I got frustrated with a coding or naming problem, I had a habit of firing rubber bands at my IBM Monochrome Display to shake up my thinking. (Don't try this with a modern flat panel.) That didn't give me any ideas. So I decided to fire up a doobie and 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! AMA, and I will see if I can remember...
  - jlgaddis 4y ago
    I was just a teenager around this time, in middle school or perhaps high school, and still in the early stages of programming (after moving on from the Commodore 64 and 6502 assembly), but -- even three decades later -- it's nice to finally have an answer to that one particular question that was asked so often and by so many all throughout those years: > Just WTF were those Microsoft guys smoking when they designed this shit? <g>

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

jasode 4y ago

>VB was basically the MS response to Borland's Delphi, No, that wasn't the timeline. Visual Basic came out in 1991. Borland Delphi was +4 years later in 1995. (Borland Turbo Pascal for Windows was 1991 but Microsoft VB's internal product development codename "Thunder" was already started in 1990.) Visual Basic (especially the GUI forms IDE paradigm and VBX components) was built on earlier ideas in 1988 by Alan Cooper : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alan_Cooper#Visual_Basic https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alan_Cooper#Visual_Basic

jhbadger 4y ago
And earlier than this, there was Apple's HyperCard in 1987 which I'm sure both the creators of VB and Delphi were familiar with. HyperCard had buttons and fields that you dragged onto a window to make an interface, and then by clicking on these widgets you had access to their properties and could write code to have them do something.
Stratoscope 4y ago
This brings back fond memories. The wiki page does have a few inaccuracies. Here is a more detailed article from Alan himself: https://onezero.medium.com/my-one-phrase-resum%C3%A9-98776ef8a6fa https://onezero.medium.com/my-one-phrase-resum%C3%A9-98776ef... (Try an incognito window if Medium blocks you.) That article has a few inaccuracies too, but as the events were over 30 years ago, this can be forgiven. Read Alan's article and then come back for this followup. Alan mentioned the "gizmos". He actually originally called them "waldos", named after these: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Remote_manipulator https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Remote_manipulator I couldn't make sense of that name, so I suggested "gizmo", which seemed fun and more descriptive. That name stuck - for a while. Microsoft later renamed them to "controls". How boring! I also developed the "gizmo interface", which Microsoft renamed to VBX. (They were really not into fun names at the time.) It has sometimes been said that Bill Gates was the one who insisted that VB have an extension interface like this. The truth is more subtle. We had the gizmo interface all along. It was obvious that we would need it for our own gizmos, and that we should allow other developers to build their own gizmos. Apparently, the Microsoft team that turned Ruby+Basic into VB was going to keep the gizmo interface private and only let Microsoft developers use it, at least at first to save time on the schedule. Bill quite rightly saw the power of exposing the interface to outside developers and decided to make it part of the product - just as we had planned all along. And I built the "event arrows" that Alan mentioned. He originally called an event a "flimsy" (a British term for "lightweight paper used especially for multiple copies"). I couldn't make sense of that name either, so we kicked it around and settled on "event". This left a problem of what to name the act of sending an event from one gizmo to another. I was familiar with the term "trigger" from SQL, but that didn't seem quite right, and we were into fun names. But I couldn't think of one! At the time, when I got frustrated with a coding or naming problem, I had a habit of firing rubber bands at my IBM Monochrome Display to shake up my thinking. (Don't try this with a modern flat panel.) That didn't give me any ideas. So I decided to fire up a doobie and 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! AMA, and I will see if I can remember...
- jlgaddis 4y ago
  I was just a teenager around this time, in middle school or perhaps high school, and still in the early stages of programming (after moving on from the Commodore 64 and 6502 assembly), but -- even three decades later -- it's nice to finally have an answer to that one particular question that was asked so often and by so many all throughout those years: > Just WTF were those Microsoft guys smoking when they designed this shit? <g>