Was browsing TSS today and came upon this silly post on Is Ruby the new Visual Basic? Its statements like these by the Ruby community that make me think they get how to do guerilla marketing. Make shocking, controversial statements to make noise. Marc was a master of it. Well, I’ve said it before, if Ruby becomes mainstream, it will be time for me to hang things and change my career or send the wife back to work and become Mr. Mom. Anyways…
Does anybody miss VB? Anybody miss the productivity we had in writing rich, functional, user interfaces in a crazy short amount of time? I sure do. I always despised web apps. Always felt that web apps, and this whole webflow bullshit, were a backward step for the industry and have killed productivity. Its why I’ve stuck to the server side the past 11 years and why I have zero interest in Seam beyond its innovative component model.
One of my most fondest memories was back in 1995 when I worked at Capital One. Java had just came out and we were developing a prototype, “heavy” applet user interface. There were no authoring tools back then to create the same rich GUIs I was used to with Visual Basic. Still, the internet was just coming of age back then, and I was able to find a tool that could generate Java SWT code from Visual Basic, text-saved, screen metadata. So, I mocked up the screens and application flow through Visual Basic, then ran the Java code generator on the VB files to generate my Java app. Took Java, what? another 5 years to have even something as close to VB? Now, the Ajax craze, and still we have crap on the web app side of things…Sad, so sad…
Bill the Plumber 
Oct 31, 2007 @ 15:03:35
I guess you mean Java AWT, not SWT 🙂
…and no I don’t miss VB since it was encouraging/generating too much boilerplate code…which over time turned into spaghetti.
But it was really fun for doing prototypes and small apps in…that I do miss.
Oct 31, 2007 @ 15:07:56
Yeah, AWT…Its been awhile 🙂
Max, maybe you’re confusing VB with VC++? VB had zero boilerplate code. In a 3-tiered system, you could basically have VB as just a shell that delegated to the server/middle-tier. A few times I did business objects in C++ and connected VB via OLE/COM (locally).
Really, I don’t miss the language itself, just the ease of which you could build apps.
Oct 31, 2007 @ 20:31:12
Java on desktop was a lost deal for Sun in the early days. There was no way it could compete with the already established Microsoft. Even the biggest Java project at those early days (San Francisco by IBM) was targeting the server. Luckily Sun realized this quite soon and turned all its efforts to the server where it was already established. Now that Java has made a name (even Sun changed its trade name from SUNW to JAVA) has more chances of making an impact on the desktop. And the future is bright 🙂
Nov 06, 2007 @ 14:23:43
Yes I miss VB dearly. If was the first platform usable at all for creating business type GUI’s. For a long time the only one available.
The fact that we now make web aps with such simple and primitive tools is devastating.
Of course the VB language never was nor is any good. It’s the ease of creating good applications that’s what is good about VB.
I need OO as much as the next guy, but if it takes me a month to create what I could do in days in VB something is very fundamentally wrong.
And something IS wrong, very wrong. The idea of C was a good one – a language easy to compile into very efficient code with the compiler technology of the day, but not easy for most humans to read. Then compiler technology became very much better, but still C++ was built on the syntax of C – reason: humans couldn’t or wouldn’t learn a new syntax. Then Java came along still building on the C/C++ unreadable stuff – because humans (programmers even) can’t learn new things!
Stupid? Ask yourself.
Then some people learn about the advantages of object oriented programming and tries to design JEE around those ideas. They never understood the relational database ideas and missed the the boat entirely. (The universities hadn’t thought relational databases for some time believing they where all fully developed so no research was possible.) It took many years and a lot of frustration to make JEE half usable in version 3. All along anyone even wanting to look could see the major flaws and what should have been done about them – but nobody wanted to.
Then there are all the millions of frameworks that solves this little problem here and that little problem there. A lot of them try to solve the problems of GUI development on top of the web. The web with it’s ideas around HTTP/HTML where fine for creating a web, but as basis for GUI development of bussiness (form based) applications has very major flaws. As usual the computing community took what existed and used it for all or rather much more than it’s worth. They designed, or tried to design, their GUI’s on top of something where it basically couldn’t be done. Nobody tried to do anything with the basic flaws. Nobody realy went to work on the development platform which was the browser in combination with the protocols to make it really useful for GUI bussiness applications. Back in the 1990’s it was obviously needed, but why do anything about it.
Hacking (in it’s worst meaning) on the current platform was always viewed as better than designing anything new around it or in addition to it.
10 years later (sometimes 20) it seems that part of the problems slowly gets fixed in this business of ours. Fast paced as it is 🙂
Dec 01, 2007 @ 01:47:47
For me it was Delphi ;-). But, you’re absolutely right. Here’s my interpretation:
Nightmares on JSF Street in Trinidad
Dec 13, 2007 @ 14:20:29
Don’t steal my material 🙂 this is one of my favorite rants…
Dec 13, 2007 @ 15:04:13
I know Andy…. 🙂 Hope you don’t mind me borrowing it.
Mar 09, 2012 @ 10:32:06
Honestly I do miss VB, the GUI development was so easy. No hassles of code, tags, layout adjustments via tags, placing event handlers without knowing what exactly they do or how the control is transferred.
In Java world we talk about Beans representing components blah blah blah…but where is a tool that can give a rich GUI? or even a tool that develops HTML layouts based on a visual design that is as foolproof as VB???
I am still surprised, even after all these years, there is not a single tool that creates HTML/front end GUI automatically based on visual design like the way VB does.
Not a single uniform solution that gives us a beautiful GUI designer and can be plugged in with any language in the back end to write event handlers or any other script/AJAX coding stuff…
I guess we are so obsessed with html, xml, xsd etc etc we forgot manual designing of GUI with a designer…
I really miss VB