4 ms·

I wonder what the programming language was like which you used, before BASIC was put into the product?

• Stratoscope 1y ago
  It was an extremely primitive language in the style of DOS batch files. But that was really kind of a placeholder. We didn't hardwire the language into the Ruby code, we made an API to allow other languages to be plugged in. And that's how it was easy for Microsoft to plug Basic in. In fact, I completely forgot the original purpose of Ruby. It wasn't intended as a complete programming environment, it was going to be a new "shell" (desktop) for Windows 3.0. Windows users would create their own custom desktops using Ruby and our primitive batch language. Somewhat related, there used to be stories about how Visual Basic was originally not going to allow third parties to create custom "controls" (or "gizmos" as we originally called them). But Bill Gates insisted on making it extensible. That may be true in a narrow sense, but it misses the bigger picture. Of course we had to create a gizmo API from the very beginning, for the original set of gizmos we had in Ruby. Buttons, lists, text boxes, and so on. My understanding is that the Visual Basic team didn't want to publish this API in the original VB release, perhaps to get the release out sooner. But Bill insisted that it be included.