
Bill Gates demonstrates Visual Basic (1991) - seddin
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fh_UDQnboRw
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nomel
My favorite part about Visual Basic was the help files. They were absolutely
great for someone learning to code. From what I remember, there was a snippet
of example code for basically everything.

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anakaine
This is how I learned to code. Ot was excellent. Its been very hard over the
course of my career to learn other non basic languages, and I attribute it
largely to those help files being so good that it became my first and main
language.

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ranqet
Had the same experience. First language I learned was VB and felt like I had
to learn programming all over again when moving on.

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nomel
I learned basic first, then microcontroller ASM, which made C just kinda make
sense when I went to it.

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smileypete
This video is pretty lengthy but well worth a watch; the oral history of Alan
Cooper, the 'father of Visual Basic'

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-wtGFgaKYI0](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-wtGFgaKYI0)

EDIT: One highlight is where Alan Cooper gets a cease-and-desist letter from
Microsoft for calling himself 'The Father of Visual Basic'...

[https://youtu.be/-wtGFgaKYI0?t=9666](https://youtu.be/-wtGFgaKYI0?t=9666)

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zubairq
I absolutely love Visual Basic and am trying to make a Javascript version at
appshare.co

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sktrdie
This shows me that coding hasn't evolved at all over the last 30 years.

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apostacy
Visual Basic was one of the first languages I learned, and I was able to
quickly make complex graphical applications.

I feel like we have regressed in a lot of ways.

Contrast building a GUI app in 1990 vs 2020.

Compare Visual Basic to something like React Native.

How much code would you have to write for some basic business application,
like having a few screens that share a state, and interface with a database?
How big would the executable be?

Visual Basic had some big flaws, but you could work around those flaws. And I
can also explain the logic of a Visual Basic program fairly easily to someone
inexperienced. And there is just so much less cognitive load involved. I feel
like 90% of the actual code that I wrote was for actually processing data.
Sure, asynchronous stuff could get difficult in VB, but that was the
exception. And I wish that VB had had reducers.

I am certain that virtualizing the x86 Visual Basic 6 runtime in Javascript
would easier to develop for and outperform many modern GUI frameworks today.

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vb6sp6
I do quite a bit of work in vb6 still. It is fast and easy to use. I really
wish Microsoft would make vb7.

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PostThisTooFast
The '90s were full of ballyhoo about object orientation and "soon we'll be
bolting together software with off-the-shelf components."

Thanks to the failure to standardize C++ ABIs (among other reasons) that
didn't happen... except for VBXs. You really could throw together a CRUD app
pretty quickly with off-the-shelf VBX controls.

