Antikythera Mechanism: An ancient 'computer' that 'shouldn't exist' [video]

Re:Antikythera Mechanism: An ancient 'computer' that 'should... by darkwater on Friday December 10, 2021 @08:35AM (#29509626)

How comes that circa 2000 VB6 was the most hated and belittled programming language out there? I was there, I remember it. Now it's suddenly part of the golden age of desktop programming? I think you should put your nostalgia glasses off.

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Re:Antikythera Mechanism: An ancient 'computer' that 'should... by jhbadger on Friday December 10, 2021 @08:43AM (#29509701)

Because the language itself was terrible. The RAD tooling/UI designer was excellent. There was a product that had those but included a better language -- Borland's Delphi, but Borland and its successors squandered its initial success and didn't invest in improving it.

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Re:Antikythera Mechanism: An ancient 'computer' that 'should... by jjkaczor on Friday December 10, 2021 @08:53AM (#29509820)

The language was crap - the IDE/designer was excellent.

For me - the sweet-spot that I used for all of my own personal projects after outgrowing VB1-6 was... Borland Delphi.

The IDE/designer was at least as good as VB - but the Object Pascal language was so powerful. It was truely object-oriented and if one wanted, one could work at a high level of abstraction. Yet it could also natively drop-down to low-level Windows API's, and handle pointer-based work if necessary.

Unfortunately - for my professional career, Delphi never captured the large-scale Enterprise market - that went to .NET or Java and the rest is history...

(Occasionally I noodle about with FreePascal for the nostalgia factor)

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Re:Antikythera Mechanism: An ancient 'computer' that 'should... by pjmlp on Friday December 10, 2021 @10:10AM (#29510755)

When the option was between VB 6 or doing COM in raw C++....

Granted we still had MFC, but then the COM lovers at Microsoft started pushing for ATL, and everything that followed from there.

On the other side we had (and still have) Delphi and C++ Builder, but Borland's management killed the indie culture around them.

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Re:Antikythera Mechanism: An ancient 'computer' that 'should... by cabalamat on Friday December 10, 2021 @08:45AM (#29509731)

VB was good at some things (e.g. UI design) and bad at others (e.g. doing complex computation).

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Re:Antikythera Mechanism: An ancient 'computer' that 'should... by II2II on Friday December 10, 2021 @08:54AM (#29509830)

It's for much the same reason that BASIC (in general) was maligned and people wax nostalgic for it today. A lot of people cut their teeth on it, may that be learning how to program or embarking upon a career in programming. In other words, they have much to be thankful for.

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Re:Antikythera Mechanism: An ancient 'computer' that 'should... by ale42 on Friday December 10, 2021 @08:45AM (#29509741)

I think that the most hated part of VB6 was more the BASIC language rather than the GUI design part... but maybe I'm wrong.

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Re:Antikythera Mechanism: An ancient 'computer' that 'should... by darkwater on Friday December 10, 2021 @02:41PM (#29514537)

I also remember DLL hell and all the issues to make safely run on every Windows installation a VB6 program and its runtime. But I agree with the other commenters that the IDE and the visual part was really nice (too nice for the average skilled developer of the time, VB6 was the NodeJS of that time)

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Re:Antikythera Mechanism: An ancient 'computer' that 'should... by bzzzt on Friday December 10, 2021 @08:58AM (#29509877)

I think it had more to do with VB being so easy it attracted lots of inexperienced programmers who didn't care about performance or correctness as long as the job got done. Sort of like a pre-internet PHP ;)

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