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Bill Gates demonstrates Visual Basic (1991) [video]
- dusted 3y agoIt's 2023, the world had a collective brain hemorrhage and now prefer to define their GUIs via two seperate text files.
- vander_elst 3y agoSomething is probably difficult to find these days is a CEO that writes code, and probably even more difficult one that writes code live in front of the audience!
- dzonga 3y agonow compare how UI development is done in the likes of react and such. that app if done in react - would be so full of subtle bugs. and way slower too. we really have regressed backwards as an industry.
- landswipe 3y agoEdgy, dissing on developer's time.
- pcdoodle 3y agoVB blows everything else today out of the water. Most kids would lose interest when you mention the word environment or toolchain. Being able to visually draw a control and then click the control to add code to its events was the best motivator because the results were instant. I can not believe how bad kids have it these days trying to learn to make an iOS app for instance, about 100 lines of code for what would be 5-10 in VB.
- gauravphoenix 3y agoDoes anyone know why the VB was named so? it had nothing to do with BASIC language. The wiki page says "Visual Basic was derived from BASIC" but I don't recall it being anything remotely close to BASIC. Or am I recollecting things wrongly? It has been 30 years :)
- bitwize 3y agoVB was based on QuickBASIC which introduced structured programming constructs and made line numbers optional. Many BASIC statements, such as PRINT and INPUT, had to be eliminated or changed because they were meaningless in the GUI world. But the fundamentals of Microsoft BASIC as it existed in the early 90s are still there.
- jfghi 3y agoPretending to improve something established? I’d say that about the C# naming.
- kube-system 3y agoOr JavaScript, which only has Java in the name because another popular language at the time did.
- gpvos 3y agoLots of its features come from BASIC, like "on error goto" (even though it now worked with labels rather than line numbers). It is a more structured kind of BASIC than many of its predecessors, but procedures and functions have appeared in earlier BASICs such as BBC BASIC, or I think later versions of QuickBASIC.
- sumtechguy 3y ago
- 369548684892826 3y agoIn 1990 we had drag and drop UI creation, double-click on the button and write the code behind it. Where did we go wrong?
- rchaud 3y agoThe closest thing we have to this currently is Excel. I can't believe there's no browser-based point and click software that lets you build web apps in JS.
- account-5 3y agoI'd have to say Access is the closest. MS Access is one of the easiest programs to use to make an app with a front end, dB, reporting, and SQL all in one package. Prototyping for a dB backed app is extremely easy. I'm fully aware of all it's drawbacks, but there's still nothing like it available today.
- steve1977 3y agoFileMaker maybe. But yeah, both tools are great for in-house applications in my experience. It’s quite easy to provide actually useful features very quickly. It might not win you design awards, but often that’s not a problem in reality. I’d rather have an inventory that is correct but maybe looks a bit homegrown than one that looks like it has been designed by Jony Ive but is wrong for example.
- account-5 3y agoI'm not a professional developer and have seen my share of badly designed Access applications created by people who don't understand normalisation, so get the bad rep Access gets in this respect. But I've created a couple of simple apps for specific tasks that work excellent for their usecase. I can't imagine there being a simpler way of doing them with other tech stacks.
- 3y ago
- WillAdams 3y agoNot bad for a market bought as a dollar purchase: https://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?story=MacBasic.txt https://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?story=MacBasic.txt (I bought a copy of Microsoft BASIC for Macintosh, and would have much rather had MacBasic)
- glimshe 3y agoVB used to be one of the most important technologies in our field. No, it was never "good" nor "elegant". But it allowed a huge humber small and medium businesses to benefit from computers. All those DVD/VHS rental stores? VB. Line of business applications for government? VB. Visual Basic allowed people with minimal knowledge of computers to write useful applications that powered the economy. This is something we often forget nowadays in the flood of frameworks, programming paradigms, microservices etc. Computers exist to serve humans, we must never lose the connection with how useful our systems are.
- worik 3y ago> VB used to be one of the most important technologies in our field. No, it was never "good" nor "elegant". Node.js for a modern take?
- xtracto 3y agoVB was the Macromedia Flash of our (pre-internet) generation. Too bad theres nothing as good an ubiquitous nowadays.
- antonjs 3y agoIt also allowed a lot of young people (ie me) to learn to make legitimate looking GUI programs without a difficult barrier to entry, on whatever windows machines our schools/houses had lying around. That and Delphi, how I miss you.
- MichaelZuo 3y agoHow would you compare VB in the early 90s to XCode in 2023?
- bdcravens 3y agoNot even close. VB was pure productivity.
- PH95VuimJjqBqy 3y agoI honestly miss VB, there was just something about it.
- dang 3y agoRelated: Bill Gates demonstrates Visual Basic (1991) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24435217 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24435217 - Sept 2020 (11 comments)
- jjice 3y agoMy dad actually worked at a startup (two programmers if I recall) in 1990 onward that wrote very similar software to MS Visual Basic and even has a BASIC derived language. It was called Realizer. They started working on this before MS announced VB, but I wouldn't be surprised if there was already similar software around. If I recall correctly, my dad was at a trade show and their booth was right next to Microsoft (whom he turned down an offer from the year prior to work at this startup instead). Needless to say, we're watching the video of a VB demo, not a Realizer one :) I can't find much online about the original Realizer, but there is a Wikipedia article for CA-Realizer, which was the version released after CA bought their company. CA-Realizer didn't really go anywhere and my dad eventually left CA as well. Very cool story though, and a large reason I chose to work at small companies fresh out of college too. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CA-Realizer https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CA-Realizer
- WillAdams 3y agoIt was the subject of a book: _Windows 3.0 for BASIC Programmers_ by Michael Hyman which I learned a great deal from (and the Poker game of which kept me entertained quite a bit working nights).
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- craig_m 3y agoHello there -I happened to be a former Within Technologies employee. You are correct that there were two primary programmers-Steve was the back end/compiler guy, and Peter was the front end guy. Was the trade show you're talking about Fall Comdex? That was after CA acquired us...I actually went since I was handling the OS/2 port of Realizer, and they wanted it demo'd at the show. What's your dad's first name, if you don't mind my asking? If it was Ivan he was my boss, and I have some funny Comdex stories involving him. I still have the glossy and manual for Realizer too.
- tiffanyh 3y agoVB is one of the only "no code / low code" tools over the last 3-decades that worked at scale.
- cryptoz 3y agoMy first paid programming job was a VB6 app in ~2004 in high school. It was initially a volunteer thing for a local youth court assistance group but they paid us $100 at the end as a kind of surprise reward. The thing had a UI with the right tab movements and backed by mysql db, and even did correlation calculations for crime statistics. I still have 1 VB app on my resume from way back then, I refuse to remove it! And boy do I miss just making stupid games really really fast, and making actual productive applications also really really fast. I had made an HTML editor with previews, syntax highlighting (lol, my own 'algorithm' haha), project management tools, and everything. I was so proud of that. The base fond VB memories are the simple joy of starting a new project (before .NET called them Solutions) and making the thing I had in mind in like a couple hours. Really miss that.
- esotericimpl 3y ago[dead]
- appstorelottery 3y agoI started with VB 1.0 for DOS, (before that I used PDQ) and used VB all the way to 6.0 - I agree there hasn't been anything like it since. However some of the downsides included DLL hell and requiring 3rd party components for functions like TCP/IP (IP-Works) and more advanced UI elements and so on. I remember investing quite a lot in such components - I recall componentsource.com as being a key marketplace. I think one of the main issues was OS integration, hooking into Win32 required all kinds of incantations. Decompilers were also an issue. It brings back memories of a much simpler time in terms of development, especially the UI editor - it was so fast to just draw a few forms and hook them up to code. I used it a lot for statistics type interfaces, and CRUD type systems, however I wrote a P2P communication tool back in 2000 that even had VOIP. I also recall writing a game that wrapped OpenGL and running it on my SGI520 Windows NT box. So much fun. I transitioned to .NET and C# and didn't look back or bother with VBScript. However I recall at the time feeling so abandoned by Microsoft, having to learn another complete system from scratch - existing projects didn't come across cleanly. Anyhow... just a bit of a greybeard rant about the 'good old times'... Just as an aside - after playing around with BBC Basic during covid, I was so impressed how OS calls were implemented in the language. If VB integrated with Win32 to the same level BBC basic integrates with RiscOS it would have been pretty much the perfect tool in my opinion.
- fuzztester 3y agoBBC BASIC had an inline 6502 assembly feature that was as simple as doing this anywhere in your BASIC program (but not in the middle of a BASIC statement, obviously): [ asm_statements ] That is, open square bracket, then write your assembly statements (one per line, as usual), then close square bracket. That's it. No assembly step required.
- weitzj 3y agoI think Excel + Visual Basic is some kind of fixed point. If you iterate long enough on your self developed backend/Frontend system to enable your BI department to work in their own with their data, it will eventually converge into something like a spreadsheet application with a custom DSL
- paulddraper 3y agoLike Access?
- weitzj 3y agoI think Excel + Visual Basic is some kind of fixed point. If you iterate long enough on your self developed backend/Frontend system to enable your BI department to work in their own with their data, it will eventually converge into something like a spreadsheet application with a custom DSL. Or the database + SQL will be your converged application
- dist-epoch 3y agoLinus Torvalds: > I personally believe that Visual Basic did more for programming than Object-Oriented Languages did. Yet people laugh at VB and say its a bad language, and they've been talking about OO languages for decades. And no, Visual Basic wasn't a great language, but I think the easy database interfaces in VB were fundamentally more important. https://blog.codinghorror.com/linus-torvalds-visual-basic-fan/ https://blog.codinghorror.com/linus-torvalds-visual-basic-fa...
- yellowviking 3y agoFrontpage. Anyone?
- Stratoscope 3y agoOoh, nice to see my project here. I was the lead developer of Ruby (no relation to the programming language), which became the "visual" side of Visual Basic. Ruby was originally going to be a customizable shell/desktop for Windows 3.0, with pretty much what Bill was demoing but a more modest scripting language - and the ability to plug in other scripting languages as desired. Microsoft decided to make Basic the scripting language and sell it as a standalone development system instead of being the Windows shell. I guess my great claim to fame is the VBX (Visual Basic eXtension) interface, which I originally called the Gizmo API. I still think "gizmo" was a much better name than "control" as Microsoft later called them. AMA.
- TrashHeap64 3y agoI'll echo others, VB was my start. The year I decided to take programming in high school, they switched from Java to VB. I had so much fun in that class going above and beyond in all my projects. When I was a kid, I used to sneak off to the computer lab and just play with the form builder. I had no idea how to code at the time but it was fun making mockups
- sundarurfriend 3y agoHave you ever created a GUI interface in Visual Basic, and seen if you could track an IP address? (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hkDD03yeLnU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hkDD03yeLnU for the younguns)
- about3fitty 3y agoMy dude. I taught VB 6 as well as Visual FoxPro in rural Kenya as part of the KASNEB/KNEC national standards. The immediacy of feedback in these platforms was responsible for many of the enlightened and motivated faces in those classrooms. Your contributions have global reach and we thank you for them.
- roydivision 3y agoThanks @Stratoscope. VB paid my rent for 3-4 years, from version 3 to version 6. I've rarely felt so comfortable and at home in a programming language / environment. Shout out to former VISBAS email list subscribers, that was a fun community.
- lappet 3y agoI really miss VB and Flash. Wish we had something like that today.
- orliesaurus 3y agoBill Gates demonstrates Retool (2024) /s
- this_steve_j 3y agoWhat a trip down memory lane (no pun intended)! Rest in peace, my WYSIWYG friend. It was a rough ride bringing VB to the web. There was VB Active Server Pages, then VB.NET Webforms, which did not always produce the most performant or secure UI code. It was like an ornery bronco in the age of industry. The concept of Viewstate was interesting and probably looked great in demo applications, but it was ultimately not the best way to avoid writing JavaScript. Sometimes it could be tamed, but for the sly cowboy, ruby on rails was the king of RAD.
- nickstinemates 3y agoVisual Basic was the greatest visual development environment I have ever used. Modern Visual Studio tooling is also pretty awesome if you're targeting Windows. I am less these days so do not have much use for this tool.
- cstrat 3y agoMy dad introduced me to Visual Basic when I was 13 and it honestly changed the trajectory of my life. Prior to this I wasn't overly interested in learning anything in particular. VB became a creative outlet and since that day I never stopped learning. Loved hitting up PlanetSourceCode to get scripts and reverse engineer other peoples code to learn. I built so many fun programs - the best of which was a chat programs using UDP so we could chat over the schools local network.
- m_st 3y agoSimilar here :-) But what would you introduce your kids today? It seems the learning curve is much steeper.
- cstrat 3y agoYeah I often think about this too... everything today feels so complex, although VB was probably just as complex under the hood. The complexity was just masked by the GUI and WYSIWYG interface.
- arnaudvalette 3y agoWell, at 13 I did build some weird CLI based text adventures in c++, mostly imperative style and badly written. I knew only how to declare a variable, how to cout/cin, loops and conditions, due to the fact that access to information was almost impossible (we had something like a subscription plan with a limited 20 hours of internet, and finding websites that I could understand about developing in C++ was hard). I remember the feeling I had the day I learned about classes and functions, a true "wow" moment. Unfortunately those text adventures died with the hard drive of the computer my parents had.
- 29athrowaway 3y agoMany people back in the day looked down upon Visual Basic development. But you will never see once again the same development speed you could achieve with Visual Basic 6.0 and earlier. The UI was instantaneously responsive, and the language had very low cognitive load.
- ChicagoDave 3y agoThe only place to buy VB 1.0 was an 800 number advertised in John Dvorak’s column in PC Info. I assume partners had access too, but it wasn’t on a shelf anywhere. $99. I bought it instantly.
- TehShrike 3y agoAfter QBasic, Visual Basic 3 on Windows 3.1 was my intro to programming. Set aside the language syntax – the way that the IDE exposed all the UI properties to you was so enlightening. You couldn't help but learn how Windows expected controls to work.
- remyt 3y agoThis brings back fond memories... For those interested, someone has been working on a "Visual Basic for Linux" called Gambas (Gambas Almost Means BASic): https://gambas.sourceforge.net/en/main.html https://gambas.sourceforge.net/en/main.html
- fuzztester 3y agoThat's been around for quite a while.
- xtracto 3y agoOh my, I've never heard about gambas. It is just what I was looking for! I always get stupid ideas about simple UI based applications in my day to day linux usage, but everything I've tried is very cumbersome. I installed and tried Gambas and it does have the VB6 feeling. A complied graphical Hello World was a matter of 5 clicks and `lblHello.Text = "Hello World!"` I'll do a lot with this. Thanks again!
- zubairq 3y agoI still remember showing a still image of this demo and discussing this at the Red Hat developer conference in 2019 in Vienna. I still think that Visual Basic was the real bicycle for the mind that brought computing to the masses!