The History and Legacy of Visual Basic

Original Article ↗ Hacker News Discussion ↗

Nostalgia and Early Approachability

  • Many recall VB (and peers like HyperCard, Flash, LabVIEW, Access) as a “magic” on-ramp: drag a button, double‑click, write a few lines, and you had a real Windows app.
  • Event‑driven programming and the visual form designer made GUIs understandable to non‑experts in a way modern stacks often don’t.
  • Several commenters say VB and QBasic directly launched their programming careers and even paid early bills or enabled side businesses.

Loss of Simple Desktop RAD and Modern Complexity

  • Common sentiment: nothing today matches VB6’s speed for prototyping desktop apps; HTML/CSS/JS, “containerized” app models, and responsive layouts feel heavy and fiddly by comparison.
  • GUI development is now burdened by multiple screen sizes, DPI, accessibility, localization, dark mode, web vs native, and cross‑platform concerns.
  • Some argue this complexity makes Electron-like approaches understandable despite their bloat.

Successors and Alternatives

  • Suggestions include Lazarus/Free Pascal, Avalonia (WPF‑like, but markup‑oriented), WinForms with VB.NET or C#, Xojo, Gambas, Tcl/Tk, GNUstep’s tools, Retool for internal tools, and Excel VBA.
  • Opinions differ on how close these come to the “VB feeling”; many see WinForms and Access as the closest spiritual successors, but documentation and COM tooling are often criticized.

VB/VBA’s Ongoing Role and Legacy Systems

  • VBA in Excel is still heavily used in locked‑down corporate environments where it may be the only automation available.
  • Classic ASP/VBScript and VB6 apps still run in production; some see this as “if it works, fine,” others as a serious risk: end‑of‑life stacks, hiring difficulty, security and maintenance problems.
  • Debate over whether VBA specifically is as problematic as obsolete VB6 runtimes and classic ASP.

Technical Side Discussions

  • Deep dives on how C#, .NET, Java, and Delphi relate (object models, strings, arrays, COM interop).
  • Reflections on COM and ActiveX: powerful and central to Windows, but with notorious security and tooling issues.

Rewrites from Scratch

  • Offshoot debate on the article’s rewrite story: some see throwing away prototypes as effective once you’ve “learned enough”; others argue full rewrites of large systems are almost always disastrous, with a few dissenters sharing successful rewrite experiences.

Insider Historical Notes

  • A former lead on the original visual “Ruby” tool (which became VB’s visual side) shares origin stories: the “fire an event” terminology and early architectural decisions that enabled VB’s extensibility via controls.