3 ms·

I remember how the last VisualBasic programmer left the first company I worked for. On one hand, he was ignorant in regards to everything we thought was manda

I remember how the last VisualBasic programmer left the first company I worked for. On one hand, he was ignorant in regards to everything we thought was mandatory for development: version control, code style, code structure. We, young Cpp/Python programmers, despised him. But nothing we had (QT, 2007-2008 web tech, etc) made it possible to spit out a business UI in an hour. To be honest, I still don't see anything comparable.

TuringTest 4y ago
> To be honest, I still don't see anything comparable. I think it's just around the corner for those types of applications to come back. And surprisingly, they will come hand in hand with note-taking outliners, not your run-of-the-mill no-code or low-code tools. See for example Obsidian canvas, released this week. I see it as functionally similar to Visual Basic GUI editor, except simpler and easier to edit; and its layout is stored as JSON in a .canvas file. The open-source Logseq is adding similar visual layout templates together with data-recovery primitives. They just need to add the core interactive data widgets (text field, text area, buttons) and expose the cards to a programming language in a end-user accesible way, and you'll have the power of a visual language, except web-integrated and with a really simple way to add data (the outliner editor). [1] https://obsidian.md/canvas https://obsidian.md/canvas
int_19h 4y ago
.NET with WinForms could do that just fine in that timeframe (and today - it's still supported), and many VB programmers ended up there. Delphi was another popular contender that's still around.
- vkazanov 4y ago
  One more thing that changed is a platform situation. Everyone is looking into building crossplatform tools, and MS tools do not really cover this front. Thus the abundance of those browser-wrappers such as Electron. The html/js stack is far from trivial but it really is truly portable. So the new visualbasic has to be different, and I don't think newer ms tools cover this niche.

TuringTest 4y ago

> To be honest, I still don't see anything comparable. I think it's just around the corner for those types of applications to come back. And surprisingly, they will come hand in hand with note-taking outliners, not your run-of-the-mill no-code or low-code tools. See for example Obsidian canvas, released this week. I see it as functionally similar to Visual Basic GUI editor, except simpler and easier to edit; and its layout is stored as JSON in a .canvas file. The open-source Logseq is adding similar visual layout templates together with data-recovery primitives. They just need to add the core interactive data widgets (text field, text area, buttons) and expose the cards to a programming language in a end-user accesible way, and you'll have the power of a visual language, except web-integrated and with a really simple way to add data (the outliner editor). [1] https://obsidian.md/canvas https://obsidian.md/canvas

int_19h 4y ago

.NET with WinForms could do that just fine in that timeframe (and today - it's still supported), and many VB programmers ended up there. Delphi was another popular contender that's still around.

vkazanov 4y ago
One more thing that changed is a platform situation. Everyone is looking into building crossplatform tools, and MS tools do not really cover this front. Thus the abundance of those browser-wrappers such as Electron. The html/js stack is far from trivial but it really is truly portable. So the new visualbasic has to be different, and I don't think newer ms tools cover this niche.