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Comment by kitd | Hacker News Reader

It was almost too good.

It encouraged a load of professionals who, though talented in their own field, should never have been near an IDE, to "knock up" a quick GUI, hand it over to the dev team, and say "Here you go. Support this."

... in my experience.

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It was useful for more than that. We built most of our COM components in C++. As we started prototyping COM components in VB... and discovered they were only about 5% slower and very easy to crank out. It was a heretical discovery kept very quiet.

COM in C++ ... shudder. That interface was very nicely hidden in VB6. It could be done in C++ but getting the typing and interface correct was awful. That switching to vb6 to make com components was easier was my exp as well. That VARIANT struct they created was a nightmare to do correctly. Which you would use a lot if you thunked between VB6 and C++.

In case you miss doing it, the new C++/WinRT is hardly any better.

Similarly I reached for VB6 any time I needed to consume a COM component. Stunningly easy compared to the absolute nightmare of consuming COM in C++. There really was no better way to do it than VB6.

Python with pywin32 [1] was also, and still is, a pretty good way to work with COM APIs. There is a book on it [2] from twenty years ago that is still surprisingly applicable.

[1] https://github.com/mhammond/pywin32/

[2] https://www.amazon.com/Python-Programming-Win32-Windows-Prog...

The alternative being that software was never written and the domain knowledge remained locked away. It needed to be treated like needs analysis. It never was.

> "knock up" a quick GUI, hand it over to the dev team, and say "Here you go. Support this."

Isn't a GUI mockup one of the best ways to come up with a consistent set of requirements for software? At least by making the mockup in VB rather than drawing it on paper, it can serve as a start for the actual GUI part of the program.

You're speaking as a pro software dev (presumably), and yes, VB was great for prototyping.

The people I'm referring to didn't realise that such esoteric things as "requirements" or "prototype GUIs" were a thing, and just handed over a ball of spaghetti for us to support.

Thing is it was never a prototype, always the end product. Had a lot of Access systems that were created by people in their roles that got widespread use then grandfathered into general dev support too. These were always horrible but too big to change.

There have a few times that I presented a VB6 prototype along with a price and had my prototype purchased on the spot. Sometimes when a client says "We need this software now", they really mean it.

My brother was studying Veterinary Science back in the day. As part of some lab work they had to do, they needed to look through a microscope and count some types of organisms they say in the microscope.

So he had this good idea of creating a simple application that would allow him to enter his data in the computer without having to move his eyes out of the microscope. He did this with a keyboard numpad and a quick VB6 prototype (which I finished the coding part for).

Those are the kind of great small programs that VB5/6 allowed people to do. And there were a lot of those small utilities all over the internet. No paywall, no ads, no subscriptions. I miss those days of creativity and sharing for the sake of it. Now the internet is all just SEO, ads and greed. What happened to kids/young Millenials and Zs?

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