From the «needs more CLI» department:
Feed: Slashdot
Title: Something Pretty Right: a History of Visual Basic
Author: EditorDavid
Date: Sat, 18 Mar 2023 18:34:00 -0400
Link: https://developers.slashdot.org/story/23/03/18/1525205/something-pretty-right-a-history-of-visual-basic?utm_source=rss1.0mainlinkanon&utm_medium=feed

Long-time Slashdot reader theodp writes: In Something Pretty Right: A History of
Visual Basic, Retool's Ryan Lucas has a nice round-up of how Visual Basic became
the world's most dominant programming environment, its sudden fall from grace,
and why its influence is still shaping the future of software development.
Visual Basic (or VB) burst onto the scene at a magical, transitional moment,
presenting a radically simpler alternative for Windows 3.0 development. Bill
Gates' genuine enthusiasm for VB is evident in an accompanying 1991 video in
which BillG personally and playfully demonstrates Visual Basic 1.0 at its launch
event, as well as in a 1994 video in which Gates thanks Alan Cooper, the "Father
of Visual Basic," with the Windows Pioneer Award. For Gates, VB was love at
first sight. "It blew his mind, he had never seen anything like it," recalls
Cooper of Gates's reaction to his 1988 demo of a prototype. "At one point he
turned to his retinue and asked 'Why can't we do stuff like this?'" Gates even
came up with the idea of taking Cooper's visual programming frontend and
replacing its small custom internal language with BASIC. After seeing what
Microsoft had done to his baby, Cooper reportedly sat frustrated in the front
row at the launch event. But it's hard to argue with success, and Cooper
eventually came to appreciate VB's impact. "Had Ruby [Cooper's creation] gone to
the market as a shell construction set," Cooper said, "it would have made
millions of people happier, but then Visual Basic made hundreds of millions of
people happier. I was not right, or rather, I was right enough, had a modicum of
rightness. Same for Bill Gates, but the two of us together did something pretty
right." At its peak, Visual Basic had nearly 3.5 million developers worldwide.
Many of the innovations that Alan Cooper and Scott Ferguson's teams introduced
30 years ago with VB are nowhere to be found in modern development, fueling a
nostalgic fondness for the ease and magic VB delivered that we have yet to
rekindle.

[image 2][2] [image 4][4]

Read more of this story[5] at Slashdot.

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[5]: https://developers.slashdot.org/story/23/03/18/1525205/something-pretty-right-a-history-of-visual-basic?utm_source=rss1.0moreanon&utm_medium=feed (link)

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