Something Pretty Right: The History and Legacy of Visual Basic

Re:Something Pretty Right: The History and Legacy of Visual ... by WillAdams on Friday March 17, 2023 @07:52AM (#35195800)

Were you aware of how MS killed off the competing MacBASIC?

Did you ever see the sourcecode for it?

How would you tell the VisualBASIC side of this story:

https://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?story=MacBasic.txt&cha...

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Re:Something Pretty Right: The History and Legacy of Visual ... by Stratoscope on Friday March 17, 2023 @01:52PM (#35200436)

I hadn't seen that story before, thanks for pointing to it. Lots of great stories on folklore.org! I recommend it to anyone interested in the early days of Macintosh.

I don't think there is a Visual Basic side to the story. Our work was many years after those sorry events.

In fact I never saw the source code for any of the Apple or Microsoft Basics, not even the "Basic" side of Visual Basic. Our team built the "Visual" side of it, code named Ruby. (No relation to the programming language.)

Originally Ruby wasn't going to be combined with Basic at all. It was going to be a user-customizable shell for Windows 3.0. Instead of Program Manager and File Manager, you could create your own desktop with things you wanted on it.

Ruby had a very primitive scripting language, but the language API was designed to allow other interpreters to be plugged into it.

Microsoft later decided to scrap the "shell" idea and create Visual Basic instead.

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Re:Something Pretty Right: The History and Legacy of Visual ... by WillAdams on Friday March 17, 2023 @03:05PM (#35201460)

Thanks!

Did HP coming out with NewWave and its scripting language influence this at all?

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