Visual Basic on the PC w/Windows 3.1
21 points by Internet_Janitor
21 points by Internet_Janitor
It might be retro, but visual basic even in that early version allowed one to visually put together UIs that were easy to wire up and fast when executed
I used VB 2 on Windows 3.11, and 4 and 5 on NT 4. It got a lot of bad press, but it was a very approachable environment. Learning BASIC was easy and you could very quickly put together simple apps that did useful (or fun) things.
I even saw one VB6 codebase for an in-house app that was cleanly structured, maintainable, and talked to a SQL Server back end.
The main problem with it was the uneven learning curve. The way you wrote maintainable and scalable software in VB and the way that you wrote quick one-off things were very different. Rapid prototypes were great but turning them into real apps required a rewrite and it was hard to persuade management to rewrite something that looked like the thing they wanted.
The version of VB5 I have came with MSVC++ 5. COM (with the ActiveX branding on top) was all the rage then, and it was possible to take bits of business logic that needed more performance (or integration with C/C++ libraries) and write them as C++ that was exposed as AxtiveX controls to VB. .NET did this a lot better, but VB.NET lost a lot of the simplicity that made VB easy to pick up.
The main problem with it was the uneven learning curve. The way you wrote maintainable and scalable software in VB and the way that you wrote quick one-off things were very different. Rapid prototypes were great but turning them into real apps required a rewrite and it was hard to persuade management to rewrite something that looked like the thing they wanted.
Heh, is there any programming environment where that is not the case?!
(I suppose there are those that are only for beginners or prototypes, and those only for “serious” software; but the massively popular scripting languages are popular largely because they bridge that divide.)
I worked on a VB6 project as a consultant in the early 2000s, and there was a ton of add-ons available for Visual Basic. Gridviews in particular were really popular for some reason. Most of these add-ons were paid, so it seemed to be a reasonably healthy economy writing them.
Anyway in the project I was on, we had a component that would automatically generate VB6 code to interface to a database, which made data access a bit easier. When I had to mess around with the code I usually used Emacs though...
Nice article & journey into the past. Bookmarked!
If you like the Windows 3.1 style of user interfaces, feel free to give Saudade (Rust cross-platform GUI toolkit with that classic look) a try: https://github.com/roblillack/saudade/