1. 1 mildly technical, mostly business-domain person, a spreadsheet + auto-clickers
2. 1.5 persons still only mildly technical and mostly business-domain-y, a VB gui and some basic network integration
3. [some time and quite a bit of revenue passes]
4. they hire some java programmers to rewrite it properly in Swing, since the VB versions had literally become impossible to modify without breaking (there were forked versions where you used version A for some feature, version B for another, version C for another - and people had tried to merge them together while keeping the whole thing working, but never managed it).
It's now been, oh, over a decade I suppose, and while I understand that there are currently some efforts underway to port the java applications to an SPA web app, it's more because the owner wants to get rid of java (and only have to hire python devs) than because the apps don't work or are hard to maintain.
My point is that without VB, the company probably wouldn't have existed to even need the Swing rewrite. So while I personally find VB to be quite caustic to my senses, I cannot deny its ability to create business value, especially because it's so approachable only mildly-technical folks.
Have you tried Delphi?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delphi_(software)
- my experience was in the 90s, but it has a similar ‘quickly build native Windows UI programs’ feel to it.
Though the language is also showing its age and perhaps isn't for everyone, like how C++ might also be an acquired taste. Some things like talking to RabbitMQ, Redis, gRPC, GraphQL or MongoDB (just as examples) might be a bit more difficult than in other languages that get more love.
It already offers plugin controls that work with the builder or just code.
Can deliver native local apps, websites, webapps, iOS and Android apps, etc.
Database controls like in VB and Delphi - and much more to come.
It is programmed in and with Common Lisp, however you can easily program events in JavaScript and Python coming soon too.
What happened was that I lost interest in creating that kind of thing. And the business decided that such programs have to go through a formal approval and release process, so it left me with no advantage over letting the software department maintain that stuff at considerably greater expense. Today, I'm willing to burden my users with stuff that requires a bit more care and feeding on their part, such as plain Python scripts. Also, VB turned into VB-dot-net.
I'm equally creative in C, but on the embedded side. Something about working within severe limitations. I'm reminded of a quote from Richard Feynman: “The game I play is a very interesting one, it’s imagination in a tight straitjacket.”
Visual Go, Visual Rust, Visual Nim and Visual Crystal, where are you?
I developed in an odd Language…LabVIEW…and I get what you’re talking about with first class GUI support and being able to see something each step along the way.
That said - while VB had an amazing IDE and overall developer experience, the VB language itself had some serious warts.
Your point is spot on.
Wait until someone shows “real” programmers PLC ladder logic and they become aware of just how much critical infrastructure runs in a programming language that was literally designed to allow electricians and mechanical engineers automate real-time safety critical automation controls.
On Error Resume Next anyone?
Myself and a lot of kids probably grew up on VB. I was one of those annoying kids writing AOL 3.0 'progs.' I don't think I've ever had as much fun coding as those days, but that's probably due to age and community moreso than VB's greatness.
I don't know why people would scoff at BASIC, tons of people make their careers writing Python, which is 100% going to be regarded as the BASIC of 201X-202X.
One of the truely great things about the drag and drop form builder was being able to sit with a user and go through requirements with them, to wire it all up later.
"Ok, so when you type in the customers details, we should have a button to save them into the database. Will we put it here?"
I fondly remember trying to explain why Emacs doesn't have a green run/build button :-)
Vb was easy in a way *nix never was!
>Planet Source Code
So many good memories of browsing that auto-scrolling list of new projects, downloading and trying something different and learning by seeing new code.
And this all still works today in VS 2022.
My impression is VB is a language sucks but VB the entire package (forms, form editor, IDE, etc) was pretty awesome.
So the arguably a similar IDE with a better language would be a huge win.
WinForms absolutely captured most of the same feel of VB6 from strictly the perspective of the tooling. I think it took a while to really catch on because, being a from-scratch rewrite, it took a while to gain complete feature parity, while also lacking the subcomponent market that a lot of VB6 projects had grown to rely on.
But then, GUI requirements also evolved. HighDPI displays, internationalization, accessibility, bigger and bigger projects needing better organizational methods. You can solve most of these issues in WinForms by being super fastidious about componentization, but it's not the happy path of just double-click-on-the-form-designer.
All of the XAML-based GUI systems that Microsoft developed since then have tried to invert that issue. They wanted to start people off by being considerate of componentization. Unfortunately, it came at the sacrifice of the usability of the tools.
I had an entire career built on developing back end tooling in VB for businesses, some of which (.. 25 years later?) are still doing their jobs. It was sometimes painful but it really did set a bar for quick productivity. Fond memories of those days!
The weirdest thing (I have ever seen in software): Once VB.net hit, all VB devs quit. VB.net was a totally different language. I guess we all moved on.
Game tooling has also moved to cross platform these days with popularity of MacOS for content creators and iOS as a target market requires MacOS for development tools.
Mac platform is about 15% of world desktop market, hope they can manage all requests from game studios all around the globe.
VB is often scoffed at, and probably to an extend rightfully so.
But those (i.e. VB1 through to VB6) were the ONLY languages that I ever managed to create useful, finished tools and programs in. Maybe it's part psychological, but I needed the approach where I created a neat UI first, got my methods pre-populated for me, and had something tangible to look at early in the process. Then went on to fill it with all with custom code. Yes, it's BASIC, but it was extensible. People I knew wrote OCX and such control elements, and code routines in DLLs in C/C++ and integrated that into VB projects, so the sky was still the limit.
Staring at an empty text document with possibly some header file statements never evoked the same creativity with me that VB did.
p.s. my proudest creation was a Windows 3.1 UI around the MS-DOS packing program "arj", for those who remember. Had I been a better businessman, that might have predated WinZip :)