Visual Basic IDE (1991) revolutionized programming. It democratized it, until JS-based web frameworks un-democratized it two decades later. - Visual designer (no code needed) - BASIC (no coder needed) - Fast (no expensive computer needed) - All-in-one (no toolchain or sophisticated build process needed)

I ran production solutions in VB up through about a year ago. VB is the most underrated development platform ever made.

It started the so-called RAD (Rapid Application Development) era

It did and I’d argue that in the business world, dominated by windows…there is nothing you can’t do. A full stack solution in VB is not only possible, what limit would you have that C# would fix?

Memories of turning my nose up at it because of C/C++ but I will admit the RAD era had its good side. You could whip up something so quickly. In fact, I think we have regressed a little in that area.

very much. we regressed to before that era. I don't know what did we do wrong. many things went wrong

eeehm sorry to bother.. but the ide concept came from turbo pascal (and later delphi). microsoft didn’t invent it.. they... eeehm.. you know 🤣

Delphi release is 3 years later tho. It's not about IDE, it's about RAD

True delphi shipped in 95. But... turbo pascal already had edit compile run in one screen.. while vb was still discovering checkboxes. 🤣 So yesss.. rad vs ide.. but the rad muscle memory was already there 😉

QBasic ('91), but yes Turbo Pascal is GOAT to me

hmmm that was interpreter I think shipped with dos so I can add to my timeline ( thank you for that

I refute it thusly:

yes

I do think Visual Basic was amazing. But... HyperCard was really the one that democratized programming for people. I love Steve Jobs, but I'm angry with him for killing HyperCard. I knew many people who never programmed anything, but they programmed something in HyperCard.

@krzyzanowskim You should check out Decker It isn’t trying to be HyperCard at all but it’s just cool

@krzyzanowskim

Though I both love your take on this topic and kind of miss the wysiwyg times also: Claiming it democatized is kind of twisted: it (the IDE) was expensive, it ran only on win, it was closed source (both IDE and language)… no community like we have today…to name a few…

indistinguishable from how AI democratizing programming

try Notepad.exe /self-promo

Since version 5.0 Visual Basic supports building native executables, which can run perfectly fine in the latest Windows 11.

that is actually insane. win32 will never die

I remember writing GUI apps in Delphi 25 years ago and it was an absolute joy. The form editor / inspector would write and dynamically maintain (!) the classes and method stubs for you and all you had to do was implement them. After that I switched to C++ for many years and I never felt that ease of use again until recently to some extent with modern game engines.

because Pascal driven language is actually very approachable

Loved Visual Basic back in the day! Can do similar things with Visual Studio and C# today!

hello! say what you want, but Microsoft certification and partnership programs are really great

Beautiful

Modern UI uses 1000x the amount of RAM and encourages horrible software patterns that inevitably lead to bugs (closures, state watching, implicit dependency injection, etc. etc.)

The fallacy started with the move to Xaml as an HTML pair… down below I think softies PMs always dreamed of web technologies for desktop, hence why we ended up with WebView2 and ReactNative now polluting everything. For all the fails of Apple camp, what Apple did well was force everyone to natively frameworks, no space for developers going rogue with nonsense experiments.

Nothing proprietary ever democratizes anything. Also BASIC code is code.

Real men use DOS.

this is either 1982, or 2025, hard to tell

I made some of my first commercial products with Visual Basic... fond memories...

"enshittified" is probably more accurate than "undemocratized"

I did all the user research for VB 1.0

Yeah well NEXT did it 3 years earlier. Microsoft wasn't very innovative. Basically they got themselves onto every computer through some... maneuvers of questionable legality, let's say, and then they just copied everybody else. It's amazing they got away with it, but they did.

indistinguishable from today's hyped tech practices

Microsoft was particularly vicious. They literally sabotaged the everliving shit out of everyone trying to compete with them. At one point you literally could not get a computer without getting a license for Windows unless it was a mac. It was just not possible.

ditto

Fair point, but that's Microsoft :D I gotta be honest, I haven't even connected my TV to the internet, and I'm not going to. It's an LG, still running the old firmware, and I use a box to manage the connections I need. WebOS will never have internet access.

Today the code isn’t the hard part the ecosystem is. Frameworks, build tools, cloud, configs… everything around the code got heavier. 😖😖😖

I’m so old, I remember QuickBasic

I agree, and add: for an advanced user, VB6 is almost as powefull as C++. You could easily access windows API and even read protected memory, but it took huge programming skills. VB6 downside is not being able to directly call standard DLLs (just COM dlls and OCX).

Fast is probably not the word i would have used to describe it, not then and not now. Once it went 32 bit it was ok, but before that it was terrible in terms of speed.

this is 8Mhz, compare to to today software and hardware

Well today we have an os that has so much going on in the background there are fewer cycles left than in a toaster. I've seen some amazing things coded in VB6 but they were not fast at runtime.

Bit that power has made optimization that is not done at compile time a lost art + that coding in low level language is not done/hardly possible on today's computers.

Time to build VisualJs for desktop application development with Electron.

it's called webflow, or smth

I was joking but yeah

We had few options in 1991... In 2025 there are 725597342.6 JS frameworks, and the npm folder is about 4.5.10²⁵ bytes.

we went from "drag a button, double click, type 3 lines" to "npm install 847 packages and pray nothing breaks"

FrontPage existed, too. It sucked.

Mac users had already been enjoying an environment like that for years by that point. HyperCard was released back in 1987! Also a crying shame that it doesn’t exist anymore.

doing away with WYSIWYG and overcomplicating it has been awful. but at the same time, a lot of the equivalent to "slop" back then was also produced. it turns out Karen from HR absolutely cannot write enterprise level process automation no matter how much she likes to make forms.

Version 2, 8 disks Ver 1, was on 2 disks

It was the various flavours of BASIC a decade earlier which created my generation of programmers, who together built everything the world depends on today. Visual BASIC was a key part of that pre-web story, and lived on for decades via its use in software like Excel.

You shouldn't have to pay to participate in democratic systems and they must in principle be transparent to be democratic. Open source software democratized computing.

Visual Basic was so underrated. It was way ahead of its time under many aspects.

NextSTEP Interface Builder came out in 1988 I think, and it was way more advanced, and the object model was built into the OS itself, with all the system apps using it. Also, running only on one BGA (Bill Gates approved) OS isn't very democratic 😎

yes. and was copy of Xerox interface builder, of and idea of IBM. not much of a point. NEXT was all but accessible to the masses in comparison.

HTMX helps re-democratize the web. It would be complete with a better backend language and Rapid Application Development environment.