It’s funny how lousy VB (and PHP a few years later) were as programming languages, even for the time. But they got stuff done, which is a good lesson.
I do think the WinForms editor in Visual Studio C# was a pretty decent spiritual successor that came close to capturing the magic of a drag-and-drop GUI builder. Aesthetically lacking but highly functional.
D'OLE, etc.
> D'OLE makes it possible for Windows developers to build robust, scalable, distributed applications today
> Building on NeXT's leadership in object-oriented software development, D'OLE brings the OPENSTEP object model(PDO) from UNIX to the Windows platform and integrates it with Microsoft's Object Linking and Embedding(OLE) object model. Through this integration with OLE, it is now possible to use popular Windows development tools, such as Visual Basic and PowerBuilder(which are currently limited to small workgroup deployments) in conjunction with OPENSTEP objects. This allows application developers to create distributed client/server applications that are scalable to the enterprise. Developers can use their tool of choice to create custom applications that employ a multi-tier distributed object architecture.
> D'OLE also makes it possible, using only OLE objects, to create a truly distributed computing environment on the Windows platform. For instance, you can modify an Excel spreadsheet running on one Windows NT client machine from a Visual Basic application running on another Windows NT client machine.
> Interoperability with OLE is accomplished via support for OLE Automation, which provides transparent integration between OPENSTEP and OLE objects. OLE objects simply connect to, and message, OPENSTEP objects just as if they were OLE objects, and vica versa. With this integration, popular Windows GUI design tools can take advantage of NeXT's advanced object technology without modification.
> D'OLE also supports the Enterprise Objects Framework. The Enterprise Objects Framework supplies data access services that allow objects to persist in industry-standard relational databases. These persistent objects provide database independence and can be reused by multiple OLE and OPENSTEP applications. The pairing of the Enterprise Objects Framework with D'OLE also enables a distributed computing environment that provides an infinitely flexible choice of application deployment strategies.
No surprise that the first GUI programs I wrote were in LabVIEW and Hypercard, followed soon thereafter by VB.
While I'm not a commercial developer, I still avoid any "stack" where the tutorial for "Hello World" doesn't fit comfortably in one page.
Usually this is either a sign of a terrible programmer or a very competent and experienced one, and it's hard to know which without seeing their other work. But I've done this before, and to good effect. Writing code is not hard. Figuring things out is hard. But once the things are figured out and well understood, rewriting them in a cleaner design is especially easy. Granted, it still takes time, that sometimes that time can be on a scale of months. But the more experienced you are, the more you can estimate that time more accurately.
saidinesh5•1h ago
I don't think I could've done that with any of the HTML5 / Web tools that were touted as an alternative at that time... Or probably even today. I mean sure there's MIT scratch that does half as many things as visual basic. But i feel like we need a little more "mature" tools that fill these gaps. I could be wrong and there's much better replacements these days..
WillAdams•28m ago
Unfortunately, that latter, after stumping for funds to go opensource has gone closed source and is now charging enough that I can't justify it for hobbyist use, and the openxtalk folks don't seem to have an easy Windows download yet (I'd love to be wrong).
I'd really like for there to be an opensource successor to VisualBasic which was cross-platform and worked well enough to be popular enough to achieve a critical mass of usage/support.