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What's a library? What's an API? Visual Basic was much more approachable than Python because it didn't even have those barriers.
by wvenable 4y ago
What's a library? What's an API? Visual Basic was much more approachable than Python because it didn't even have those barriers.
- dragonwriter 4y agoClassic VB had libraries and references to them. And an API is just whatever interface any piece of code exposes, and it definitely had those.
- wvenable 4y agoBut you didn't even have to open the references dialog to create an application. VB was great because it made easy stuff easy but it also made more difficult stuff possible. You could reference other libraries, of course. You could also directly call Win32 APIs. But you didn't need to that. You didn't need any boilerplate or ceremony -- you could drop a button on a form, double-click on it to add code, and make it do something without knowing anything about the infrastructure to make that possible. As far as I know, there are no tools that do something equivalent now that aren't so sandboxed that it's a dead end.