I started with VB6, but I was not a great fan of the language. Soon, I moved to MSVC++6 with MFC, and even though it had its own RAD system for designing dialogs, it was so half-arsed and limiting compared to Visual Basic. You couldn't even change the foreground colour of a label!
I still remember the envy when I found out Delphi developers were not subject to these silly restrictions, and their GUIs were always so colourful.
rbanffy · 51d ago
I like the idea of an IDE with integrated GUI builder. We had a couple - I used NetBeans to make Java ME applications for phones.
Shouldn’t be too hard to build a framework that loads a GUI definition and auto-binds UI events to functions according to a naming convention. I wouldn’t be surprised if there isn’t already such a thing for Python.
guidedlight · 51d ago
VB UI’s tended to be fixed and designed for a world where everyone ran a 4:3 640x480 VGA monitor. This made VB’s UI builder very easy to achieve good results.
I’m not sure the same approach would work today.
rbanffy · 51d ago
Just replace pixels with millimetres and we are safe.
At some point it got anchors in the widgets so you could position it at a distance of another control or the window border (at least). The same effect can be done with layout managers and other tricks.
lysace · 51d ago
There has been so much VB love here lately. Here are some counterpoints:
In the 90s, when you saw that a Windows app needed Visual Basic DLLs, you kind of knew that the app in question was very likely created by a complete amateur.
The best apps tended to be tiny and written in C by wizards.
pvg · 51d ago
Some miss old handy tools, others miss the old gatekeeping.
lysace · 51d ago
Gatekeeping or not, it was a useful indicator. There was so much crap.
I’ve seen terrible programs written in all sorts of languages.
lysace · 51d ago
And there were no patterns, particulary between 1992-1995, for MS Windows apps?
tptacek · 51d ago
Bracketing this with '92-'95 makes the claim so much funnier.
rbanffy · 51d ago
One thing VB allowed was horrible visual design. When you wrote a Windows app in C or C++, you are happy when the button appears in the UI and you leave it alone at that point. VB allowed people to customise their buttons with all sorts of colours and patterns no sane UI designer would attempt.
pvg · 51d ago
Same with Hypercard, perhaps even more so since Hypercard let you respond to UI gestures the standard UI didn't really use like mouseovers.
rbanffy · 50d ago
HyperCard, at least initially, didn’t have color, so it somewhat limited how horrendous the UI could be.
mattl · 51d ago
When you go to a modern website and you see it downloads 900kb of JavaScript just to show you the homepage, how do you feel about that?
I was a VB developer for a few years. I'm trying to remember the name of the tool we used to bundle VB applications into a single binary. It wasn't a Microsoft tool.
lysace · 51d ago
> When you go to a modern website and you see it downloads 900kb of JavaScript just to show you the homepage, how do you feel about that?
That shipping sites like that should cause you to pay some kind of tax. Use that tax income to invest in software security.
mattl · 51d ago
I saw a thread the other day on creating a website without JavaScript and so many people were saying it couldn’t be done.
guidedlight · 51d ago
Most apps in the 90’s/early 00’s were tiny. They did one thing well.
It’s in that context, VB did really well. The thing that VB didn’t do well is scale due to language limitations, but for tiny apps it didn’t matter.
jperoutek · 51d ago
VB.NET is still a supported platform by microsoft, with the GUI builder and everything. We still use VB.NET exclusively at my current job, for better or for worse. With the addition of tools and libraries like DevExpress, its honestly not a bad setup.
mattl · 51d ago
IIRC, VB.NET disregarded the 20+ years of VB developers for the most part.
TrackerFF · 51d ago
VB.NET works just fine, no? Granted it is 13-14 years since I last time touched VB.NET, but slapping together apps in visual studio was a breeze. If something serious hasn't happened since then, it should still be easy.
gschizas · 51d ago
Modern VB.NET (and C#) suffer from overcomplication, from trying to do too much. And at the same time, not doing enough.
There are (at least) three ways to make a desktop application (Classic Windows Forms, XAML and other, more different XAML, for what used to be Metro/Windows Store apps). Not all functionality overlaps between them.
There are a plethora of (paid) custom controls which reimplement the wheel for all of those (because Microsoft didn't bundle in some elementary Windows controls)
That being said, I personally miss LightSwitch.
neonsunset · 51d ago
You are confusing platform-specific(!) GUI frameworks with the languages themselves, which have been long "divorced" from the platform they initially targeted.
nom · 51d ago
VB will always have a special place in my heart.
On Error Resume Next
dyl000 · 51d ago
I was a real big fan of vb.net! Built so much with it.
jenkstom · 51d ago
Why not Delphi? And why not Lazarus?
mattl · 51d ago
> Why not Lazarus?
I've never heard of this or if I have, I don't remember it.
It's an open source IDE that's Delphi compatible. The author of the article is trying to make a Mac app.
* Downloads are from an ad-ridden SourceForge page.
* I download Lazarus I don't get a nice little Mac app... I get a folder full of stuff
* Starting the app, macOS tells me “lazarus” is damaged and can’t be opened. You should move it to the Trash.
* On the project screenshots page, ReactOS is shown before macOS and macOS screenshots are from a while ago.
Contrast that experience with... VSCodium, the open source community version of VSCode.
* Download is from GitHub, no ads.
* Downloads a disk image with a familiar pattern
* Drag the VSCodium app bundle to my Applications folder
* I get prompted if I want to open it as it's something downloaded... and VSCodium opens (slowly at first) -- up pops a message saying I've downloaded the x86 version by mistake and I should download the ARM64 version and there's a link to do it... downloading the correct version and it opens instantly.
--
All of this to say... with any project, open source or proprietary there is a sense of native/correctly packaged for your OS that's obvious, and if a project doesn't do that I wonder if anyone is using it for that OS.
I still remember the envy when I found out Delphi developers were not subject to these silly restrictions, and their GUIs were always so colourful.
Shouldn’t be too hard to build a framework that loads a GUI definition and auto-binds UI events to functions according to a naming convention. I wouldn’t be surprised if there isn’t already such a thing for Python.
I’m not sure the same approach would work today.
At some point it got anchors in the widgets so you could position it at a distance of another control or the window border (at least). The same effect can be done with layout managers and other tricks.
In the 90s, when you saw that a Windows app needed Visual Basic DLLs, you kind of knew that the app in question was very likely created by a complete amateur.
The best apps tended to be tiny and written in C by wizards.
I was a VB developer for a few years. I'm trying to remember the name of the tool we used to bundle VB applications into a single binary. It wasn't a Microsoft tool.
That shipping sites like that should cause you to pay some kind of tax. Use that tax income to invest in software security.
It’s in that context, VB did really well. The thing that VB didn’t do well is scale due to language limitations, but for tiny apps it didn’t matter.
There are (at least) three ways to make a desktop application (Classic Windows Forms, XAML and other, more different XAML, for what used to be Metro/Windows Store apps). Not all functionality overlaps between them.
There are a plethora of (paid) custom controls which reimplement the wheel for all of those (because Microsoft didn't bundle in some elementary Windows controls)
That being said, I personally miss LightSwitch.
I've never heard of this or if I have, I don't remember it.
It's an open source IDE that's Delphi compatible. The author of the article is trying to make a Mac app.
* Downloads are from an ad-ridden SourceForge page.
* I download Lazarus I don't get a nice little Mac app... I get a folder full of stuff
* Starting the app, macOS tells me “lazarus” is damaged and can’t be opened. You should move it to the Trash.
* On the project screenshots page, ReactOS is shown before macOS and macOS screenshots are from a while ago.
Contrast that experience with... VSCodium, the open source community version of VSCode.
* Download is from GitHub, no ads.
* Downloads a disk image with a familiar pattern
* Drag the VSCodium app bundle to my Applications folder
* I get prompted if I want to open it as it's something downloaded... and VSCodium opens (slowly at first) -- up pops a message saying I've downloaded the x86 version by mistake and I should download the ARM64 version and there's a link to do it... downloading the correct version and it opens instantly.
--
All of this to say... with any project, open source or proprietary there is a sense of native/correctly packaged for your OS that's obvious, and if a project doesn't do that I wonder if anyone is using it for that OS.