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Nice project. Visual basic like this is so useful for beginners because almost everyone who likes programming wants to create a GUI for their program, but windo

Nice project. Visual basic like this is so useful for beginners because almost everyone who likes programming wants to create a GUI for their program, but window toolkits are a pain to use and not very intuitive. That is also why I like HTML and plain javascript. It's much easier to design an interface in HTML than write code for one in GTK for example.

ben_w 4y ago
I have a similar (negative) feeling about SwiftUI, but I'm worried that might just be me getting old.
hakfoo 4y ago
I figure this is sort of a "hedonistic traadmill" for software. The software most new users work with everyday is going to be GUI and event-driven. If you start with an introductory language (BASIC, Python, whatever) and all you can do is prompt-and-answer, with no native UI conventions, you're not going to feel like you're a first-class citizen-- any wins you have in terms of code structure and algorithm design are always offset by a clunky experience that doesn't feel native. That's going to be a letdown to some new developers. There's also likely some conceptual language changes: many new developers start because they had an itch to scratch, and if the tooling they see doesn't let them describe what they want, they won't stick around. Today's new devs may well be thinking in terms of a UI. Another completely from right-field suggestion is TCL/Tk. There was a period (before the era of Python/Tk) when it was the easiest way to get a GUI project up and running on Linux. It occupies an interesting place between "shell automation" and "full scope programming"
katzgrau 4y ago
Very true. As a teen, before I could program, I would dream up applications that I thought were cool (like an alarm clock application that plays a .wav or .mp3 for the sound!!1) and yep, it involved a gui. My first programming books were for qbasic and basic and I was like, huh, where does the clicking stuff come in? Then on irc or a forum, someone pointed me to visual basic and I never looked back. Plus, all the hard stuff like media playing and file picking was a built in control that I could use. Later, in AP comp sci in high school, they were teaching us the swing ui stuff for java, and that was ... painful by comparison. Kids in class has no idea how easy it could be.

ben_w 4y ago

I have a similar (negative) feeling about SwiftUI, but I'm worried that might just be me getting old.

hakfoo 4y ago

I figure this is sort of a "hedonistic traadmill" for software. The software most new users work with everyday is going to be GUI and event-driven. If you start with an introductory language (BASIC, Python, whatever) and all you can do is prompt-and-answer, with no native UI conventions, you're not going to feel like you're a first-class citizen-- any wins you have in terms of code structure and algorithm design are always offset by a clunky experience that doesn't feel native. That's going to be a letdown to some new developers. There's also likely some conceptual language changes: many new developers start because they had an itch to scratch, and if the tooling they see doesn't let them describe what they want, they won't stick around. Today's new devs may well be thinking in terms of a UI. Another completely from right-field suggestion is TCL/Tk. There was a period (before the era of Python/Tk) when it was the easiest way to get a GUI project up and running on Linux. It occupies an interesting place between "shell automation" and "full scope programming"

katzgrau 4y ago

Very true. As a teen, before I could program, I would dream up applications that I thought were cool (like an alarm clock application that plays a .wav or .mp3 for the sound!!1) and yep, it involved a gui. My first programming books were for qbasic and basic and I was like, huh, where does the clicking stuff come in? Then on irc or a forum, someone pointed me to visual basic and I never looked back. Plus, all the hard stuff like media playing and file picking was a built in control that I could use. Later, in AP comp sci in high school, they were teaching us the swing ui stuff for java, and that was ... painful by comparison. Kids in class has no idea how easy it could be.