

Linus Torvalds, Visual Basic Fan (2006) - gauravpandey
http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2006/07/linus-torvalds-visual-basic-fan.html
Improved title
======
Nursie
I used it a few times.

You could draw a frontend easily. You could glue together fairly high level
components trivially. You could connect window/component/widget clicks and
actions to code trivially. Want a thing that sits in the systray, scans a
directory for new files, reads lines out of them and spews them out somewhere
over the network? Easy. Make a test frontend that calls a bunch of scripts and
dumps the results in a grid? Done.

It had a bad rep because in a lot of ways it felt like a toy, and because a
lot of bad software was written in it by people that didn't really know what
they were doing. OTOH that also made it a really accessible first step for
some folks.

~~~
karterk
In many ways, Rails is the new VB. A little hyperbolic, perhaps, but I see a
similar mindset when people ignore the language Ruby and live only in the
world of Rails, eventually leading to shitty code.

~~~
Argorak
It doesn't necessarily lead to shitty code. There, it is a question of how
good he is a _race car driving_.

(For those that don't want to click the link: (turing-unaware) race car
drivers are programmers that know a single high-level technology very well,
but are unaware of the things that the technology is based on. Somehow like
Formula 1-drivers.)

[https://sites.google.com/site/steveyegge2/age-racecar-
driver](https://sites.google.com/site/steveyegge2/age-racecar-driver)

~~~
robin_reala
Interesting link: David Hansson, creator of Rails, is also a professional race
car driver.

[http://david.heinemeierhansson.com/#driver](http://david.heinemeierhansson.com/#driver)

------
stiff
Wow, a postcard from the past for me. Mirror of the original full interview:

[http://web.archive.org/web/20080325033938/http://www.stifflo...](http://web.archive.org/web/20080325033938/http://www.stifflog.com/2006/10/16/stiff-
asks-great-programmers-answer/#more-9)

~~~
andrewcooke
thanks (for the copy + the original). have to say, i am no great fan of gvr,
but he doesn't come across as a jerk to me - strange interpretation from
atwood.

~~~
skrebbel
A guess:

To the question "What do you think makes some programmers 10 or 100 times more
productive than others?"

Guido van Rossum answers "Genetic differet brain structure." (sic)

Tim Bray answers "The surprising variability of the human mind."

I think they're basically the same answer, but Tim Bray's is the very American
politically correct "hooray to everybody!" version. Given that the title of
the blog post refers to "great programmers", Guido's answer could be read as
"my brain is super awesome and yours is not". Which, I bet, is not what he
meant.

~~~
jonahx
Dismissing the difference between those 2 answers as political correctness,
while not completely inaccurate, misses a larger point imo. It almost seems to
me there is a different attitude toward other people and the world contained
in them.

~~~
skrebbel
i dismiss the difference as culture. If you really directly translate 'the way
people say things' to 'the way people think about others' then I doubt you've
been much in contact with people from other cultures than your own.

------
davidw
Making stuff easier for more people is tremendously important for programming
languages.

I hate - really hate - working with it, but I have to acknowledge that PHP has
made a lot of things possible that otherwise might not have been because it
made it much easier for people to start doing web stuff.

------
crb
In what you might loosely term the golden age of the Windows Desktop - lets
say 1995 to 2005, - "custom business application", especially within a large
company, was generally done on one of these platforms:

    
    
      - Excel
      - Visual Basic
      - Lotus Notes
      - Microsoft Access
      - Foxpro
    

(Your list may vary depending on where you are in the world, etc)

For the company who is modernising their IT, perhaps "moving to the cloud",
they have to replace a lot of the functionality that was built on these
platforms (especially if the vendor doesn't support them any more, or wants to
charge an unviable amount to do so).

What is the modern web equivalent to the "drag and drop programming" paradigm
for simple form applications? There are the scaffolding frameworks for proper
programming languages (Rails, etc), but they just simplify the process, rather
than allowing non-programmers people to design their forms, and then having a
little bit of workflow which either they, or their technical colleagues, add
on?

Or these things an antique from a time before multiple front-ends were
necessary, and when they were safely run on a trusted network alone, and there
will never be a place for their return?

~~~
pjmlp
CLIPPER applications running inside a MS-DOS virtual window, because workers
still needed to access Office from their Windows 3.11 for Workgroups
environment.

Delphi and C++ Builder, the simplicity of VB for laying out forms, with the
performance of native code. These still exist by the way.

------
arocks
I think the title is a bit leading calling him a "fan" of VB. I have the exact
same views as Linus in that it was a great language to learn programming than
teaching OOP to beginners with silly real world examples (Cars, anyone?)

I think what Linus wanted to highlight was that VB was a great environment to
quickly get results in the real world, something which I think he highly
regards. It might not be the most elegant language to program in but it had an
incredible IDE, tons of prebuilt components and looked exactly as it was
developed after it was deployed.

------
gfosco
VB did an incredible amount for the industry, and version 6 is still in use
(as are versions of Delphi which I consider very comparable.) Simple interface
building, easily comprehensible connections and events, along with an easy
build/deployment process. I owned both and they definitely played a role in my
personal evolution.

------
bryanlarsen
And it was Visual Basic that turned me on to Linux. I purchased VB 1.0 for an
app I had to build. I paid $120 for it which was a lot of money for me at the
time. The app was right in the sweet spot for VB, but being a 1.0 it was
unusable. VB 1.1 fixed all the bugs I needed, but they charged $60 for the
upgrade. Charging $60 for bug fixes turned me into a Microsoft hater. The next
semester I downloaded 386BSD and started my transition away from Microsoft.

------
ksec
And yet no one is building another Visual Basic today anymore. Purely, In
terms of ease of programming. We have't had single improvement since the days
of VB6.

~~~
BudVVeezer
Xojo (formerly REALbasic) fits the bill: [http://xojo.com/](http://xojo.com/)

------
willvarfar
Another thing that Linus says is:

> I have a soft spot for Andrew Tanenbaum’s "Operating Systems: Design and
> Implementation".

I too liked VB6/VBA. Actually a really productive language and development
environment. Joel Spolsky describes his part in designing the language:
[http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2006/06/16.html](http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2006/06/16.html)

~~~
berntb
Hey, it is a good book.

(And I don't think Tanenbaum/Linus have much problems with each others,
anyway.)

On the subject: The problem with tools like VB is that they are hard to grow
up in; something which both support the first steps ("baby language") and
serious development.

Today Linus might argue that the scripting languages (Ruby, Perl, PHP, etc)
fill this niche in the FOSS world. But with the web as GUI.

~~~
aylons
Well, Tannenbaum actually talks about the development of Linux and how it
relates to Minix on his other book on operating systems.

Linus disagreed on the microkernel stuff of Minix and decided to build its on.
So, he surely likes the Tannenbaum book on Minix, otherwise he would not have
used it as a forking point.

------
protomyth
I was always jealous of the component catalogs of prebuilt VBX / OCX
components. It was amazing how much functionality (aka solving the business
problem) you could do by just getting a load of components and writing some
glue code / UI.

CPAN comes closest for me or the old NeXTSTEP object catalog, but VB was
amazing for it.

------
imdhmd
My first computer program was in VB.

I picked up a book (forgot the name) to learn programming as a hobby. This
book had a project based approach to teach. Step by step it helped me write a
tic-tac-toe program using Visual Basics. It was easy, it was fun, it was hands
on. It helped me quickly relate to basic programming constructs like
conditional statements, loops and branching.

It turned out not only a wise choice for someone who was experimenting with
programming, but also a natural choice because, as soon as i looked at the
books content and illustrations, i knew what i would be able to get out of
this exercise and it seemed both interesting and achievable.

------
kabdib
VB was actually a pretty decent language (not as nice as Python, but better
than, well, BASIC).

We used it for doing quick user interfaces and "shell" applications for
servers. It was well suited for this; you could use much of the Windows API
surface, and VB could host DLLs for doing heavy lifting.

Once you got over the "Ewww, I'm using VB" sensation and turned off the
obvious brain damage (ON ERROR NEXT, for instance) it was fine. There have
been many absolutely brain-dead and horrible languages in the world, but VB is
not automatically one of them.

Doesn't mean I'd use it today though.

~~~
eterm
On Error Next is particularly nasty because somehow it behaves differently in
the windows 8 runtime than the windows 7 runtime: some errors inside DLLs
escalate into a runtime exception in win8 when they were trapped OK in win7.

I wish I didn't know this.

------
toyg
Would be nice to add (2006) to the title.

~~~
gauravpandey
Thanks, done.

------
nikcub
and yet VB hasn't really done much in over a decade. doing what VB did for
desktop apps to web/mobile apps is a _huge_ opportunity that nobody has
managed to nail.

~~~
kd5bjo
Microsoft effectively killed VB with .NET and replaced it with an alternate
syntax for C#. Being familiar with VB6 was more of a hindrance than a help to
writing any code in VB.NET, and every VB program had to be ported.

------
sn0v
I thought Jeff was active again when I saw this :/

~~~
gauravpandey
Jeff is active a little bit in blogging but not on codinghorror.com, see
[http://blog.discourse.org/](http://blog.discourse.org/)

------
damian2000
From the mid 90's to ~2001 for windows development your alternative was
complex windows frameworks like MFC, which took hundreds of lines of
boilerplate code to get a simple app going. VB by comparison had a reasonable
amount of speed, no boilerplate and could still call C/C++ libraries.

------
orng
I was very surprised and fairly dissapointed to see the comment about Guido:
"Guido Van Rossum, for example, comes across as kind of a jerk."

This was an unnecessary comment and having read the original interview I don't
really agree with it either.

------
zandorg
It's interesting that Ruby was the name of VB before Microsoft bought it.

------
billpg
I needed to track some IP addresses once. Visual Basic came in very useful.

------
epo
Appreciating a system for it's strengths is somewhat different to being a fan.
Rather, I would say that using the right tool for the job denotes maturity and
breadth of experience.

------
ExpiredLink
Commas are relevant. Even in the English language.

~~~
gauravpandey
Yeah, have improved the title now. :)

------
tzury
Oh no.

Don't bring back that "Guido Van Rossum, for example, comes across as kind of
a jerk" again!

Sad Comment :/

~~~
rca
I've seen several reactions like yours, but after reading the interview i've
got to say it gave me the same feeling about Guido Van Rossum. Most of his
answers are slightly-off one-liners, like he doesn't care about the interview
at all. Now I guess his main point is, like he says in its answer to the first
question (which must have been swapped btw no?) : "Your questions are rather
general and hard to answer. :-) I guess being able to cook an egg for
breakfast is invaluable", which i would agree with. So I wouldn't say that he
is a jerk but compared with the good-will of the other interviewees, I see how
he can come across as one.

------
jokoon
original link to the series of questions is dead.

