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A comment on Why I am called "the Father of Visual Basic" (1996). Parent comment

Re:Why I am called "the Father of Visual Basic" (1996) by analog31 on Wednesday March 18, 2015 @09:09PM (#9229690)
VB (and developers like me) always took a fair amount of heat for a "toy" development tool. Likewise HyperCard, which I used before VB. Yet the productivity achievable with those tools, for the right kind of project of course, was game changing for those of us who otherwise found UI development to be either onerous or forbidding.

I had simply assumed that VB was Microsoft's attempt to one-up HyperCard, and it's very interesting to learn about VB's real origins.

I developed industrial process controllers using VB. A stripped down Win3 or Win95 system running VB was actually virtually crash proof. Of course this didn't prevent me from incorporating redundancy into the hardware, to take the machine into a safe state if the PC stopped working for any reason.

What the dot net version seemed to do, was to make VB the equal of the other Microsoft languages, feature by feature. The result was that they lost the reason why VB developers loved VB. I continued using version 6 (pre dot net) for several more years after that.

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Re:Why I am called "the Father of Visual Basic" (1996) by pacaro on Wednesday March 18, 2015 @09:17PM (#9229710)
I agree with you, but there are some interesting gotcha's in this. Windows 3 accumulated cruft and needed to be cleaned or rebooted regularly. The company I worked for in the late 90's had a public safety customer that ran our code on a Windows 3.0 box, I can't remember the time interval, but periodically one of our developers would go on site and (in NuMega SoftIce - which we habitually ran everywhere) would reset the windows tick counter, and flush crap out of various OS handles tables.

Having done low-level messing about on 16-bit windows, when I moved to Redmond and started working for MS it was hard to drive past BurgerMaster without buying something in homage.

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Re:Why I am called "the Father of Visual Basic" (1996) by analog31 on Wednesday March 18, 2015 @09:44PM (#9229780)
That's a good point, and I may have done inadvertent cruft cleaning just by updating my program periodically, since it was so easy to just reboot the system.
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